A billboard of Vladimir Putin reads, “Crimea. Russia. Forever” on Aug. 17, 2015 in Simferopol, Crimea. Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a bill in March 2014 to annex the Crimean peninsula, but Ukraine and most of the international community do not recognize its annexation. (Alexander Aksakov/Getty Images)

Canada last year quietly funded a $3.7-million program to provide cybersecurity training and software to Ukraine in response to cyberattacks by hackers linked to pro-Russian organizations, and possibly to the Russian government itself.

The contract was awarded to Arcadia Labs Inc., also known as Arc4dia, a cybersecurity company whose executive team includes at least two former employees of Communications Security Establishment, Canada’s signals intelligence agency, and two veterans of the Canadian Forces.

The government revealed the contract in a quarterly disclosure of grants and contribution awards over $25,000, but never publicly announced it due to what Amy Mills, a spokeswoman for Global Affairs Canada, described in an email as “security concerns.”

“Due to the hostile cyberenvironment in Ukraine, the disclosure of the specific training and tools would jeopardize the effectiveness of the project activities, and results achieved to date, and the government of Ukraine would be at even greater risk of more sophisticated cyberattacks and other hostile actions,” she wrote in a separate email.

Mills said security concerns also prevented her from divulging details of the project, though she and a different spokeswoman later provided broad outlines. The project, said Rachna Mishra, was funded through the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development’s Global Peace and Security Fund and stemmed from an unsolicited proposal by Arc4dia. As such, there was no requirement for a competitive bidding process, wrote Mishra. (The Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development was renamed Global Affairs Canada by Canada’s new Liberal government after the federal election last October.)

Documents released under the Access to Information Act describe the project’s purpose as helping Ukraine counter “foreign and criminal cyberactions,” suggesting some of the attacks originate in Russia—which in 2014 invaded and then annexed the Ukrainian region of Crimea, and since then has also covertly invaded and backed an insurgency in eastern Ukraine.

“Since the commencement of hostilities, the Russian-backed insurgents have been supported by [redacted] hacker groups, which have targeted the Ukrainian government information infrastructure, in an attempt to undermine the government as well as to disseminate hostile propaganda,” reads a “project initiation authorization.”

“In several multi-level engagements the government of Ukraine has asked Canada to provide expertise in the area of cybersecurity in order to respond to cyberattacks against the country’s information and communications infrastructure.”

In an interview with Maclean’s, Vadym Prystaiko, Ukraine’s deputy foreign minister and a former ambassador to Canada, said Ukraine faces cyberattacks “each and every day.” He was not aware of the project run by Arc4dia, but noted that Canada contributes to NATO’s “Centres of Excellence,” which deal, among other things, with cybersecurity training.

Canada did publicize its $3-million contribution to those NATO centres. Indeed, while the Conservatives were in power in Ottawa, the government loudly trumpeted most anything Canada did to help Ukraine.

In August 2014, for example, James Bezan, then parliamentary defence secretary, accompanied two Canadian Forces flights delivering surplus non-lethal military gear such as tents and sleeping bags to Ukraine. According to the Ottawa Citizen, the government spent $1.6 million delivering the gear, which it valued at $5 million. A portion of that $1.6 million went to pay for a photo team the government sent to document the event.

Will Lymer, co-founder of Arc4dia, worked as a special assistant in the Prime Minister’s Office of Stephen Harper from 2008 to 2010. In an email, he said questions about the project should be directed to the government.

Mills said Global Affairs Canada was “not aware of any outside influence on the awarding of this project,” adding it was funded “based on value for money, and confirmation that the organization has the capacity and the financial means to undertake this project.” A handwritten note on the margins of the project’s “initiation authorization” indicates it was approved in January 2015 by the foreign affairs minister—then John Baird.

The initiation authorization also notes Arc4dia’s “extensive experience” working with Canadian government departments and agencies, although it’s not clear that the company has existed that long. According to Lymer’s LinkedIn page, the company was founded in January 2014. A lobbyist for Arc4dia registered in December 2012. The company established a Facebook account in 2010 but did not post anything until December 2014. A Twitter account was established in February 2013.

From September 2014 to April 2015, Arc4dia was the beneficiary of the Canadian Trade Commissioner Service’s Canadian Technology Accelerator program that provides mentoring and business connections to companies who must compete to be selected.

Arc4dia’s project assisting Ukraine is scheduled to conclude at the end of March.

]]>Coming soon: The Mohamed Fahmy moviehttp://www.macleans.ca/news/world/coming-soon-to-theatres-near-you-the-mohamed-fahmy-movie/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/coming-soon-to-theatres-near-you-the-mohamed-fahmy-movie/#commentsMon, 01 Feb 2016 22:48:13 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=829051The Canadian journalist who spent 400 days in an Egyptian prison says a feature film based on his memoir is being made

The story of Canadian journalist Mohamed Fahmy’s 400-day imprisonment and ultimate release—along with colleagues Peter Greste and Baher Mohamed—from an Egyptian jail will be made into feature film.

The three Al Jazeera journalists were arrested in December 2013 and accused of conspiring with the Muslim Brotherhood Islamist group to spread false news and damage national security.

They were originally sentenced to between seven and 10 years in jail. Greste was released in February of last year and deported. Fahmy and Mohamed were also released pending a retrial and remained in Egypt. They were again found guilty and sentenced to at least three years in prison, but were pardoned and freed last September.

While in prison, their case was championed by advocates of press freedom. Fahmy, in May 2014, was given the Canadian Committee for World Press Freedom Award—an occasion he marked with a letter to those celebrating World Press Freedom Day that was smuggled out of his prison cell in Egypt.

The movie will be based on Fahmy’s memoir, The Marriott Cell, which will be published this fall. British film agency the Development Partnership has acquired the rights. Former journalist Michael Bronner will write the script. Egyptian actor Amr Waked, who has previously appeared in Salmon Fishing in Yemen and Syriana, will play the role of Fahmy.

In an interview with Maclean’s, Fahmy says the book and film will reveal for the first time secret negotiations—involving Egypt and other parties he would not name—that led to his release. Fahmy says he and his colleagues were pawns in a bigger fight between Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates on the one hand, and Qatar—whose government funds Al Jazeera—on the other. “There’s an untold story here,” he said.

The movie does not yet have a director or anticipated release date. In the meantime, Fahmy has returned to Canada and is teaching journalism at the University of British Columbia.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/coming-soon-to-theatres-near-you-the-mohamed-fahmy-movie/feed/2Mohammed al-Nimr on his father’s execution in Saudi Arabiahttp://www.macleans.ca/news/world/mohammed-al-nimr-on-his-fathers-execution-in-saudi-arabia/
Fri, 29 Jan 2016 21:35:24 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=828299Nimr al-Nimr's son on last words with his father and what Saudi Arabia may do with armoured vehicles from Canada.

Bahraini protesters hold placards bearing portraits of prominent Shiite Muslim cleric Nimr al-Nimr during clashes with riot police in the village of Sitra, south of the capital Manama, on January 8, 2016, following a protest against his execution by Saudi authorities. (Mohammed al-Shaikh/AFP/Getty Images)

Mohammed al-Nimr is the son of Nimr al-Nimr, a Shia cleric and critic of the Saudi government whose execution (along with 46 others) this month on charges of terrorism triggered global outrage, the breakdown of diplomatic relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia and a sharp escalation in hostility between the two regional powers. Mohammed al-Nimr spoke to Maclean’s from the United States, where he has lived since 2010.

Q. When was the last time you saw your father?

A: A year and a half ago. There is a prison in Jeddah and he was in that prison. He could barely walk, even though he was injured two years earlier. They brought him in a wheelchair.

He was still injured from being shot in the leg when he was arrested?

It was not treated properly, and I think that was an intentional action. They wanted to make him suffer.

What did you talk about?

When we meet him as a family, he is just a father to us. He would ask us about our lives. He would just encourage us to make plans, to make our goals big and go as quick as we can to reach our goals. He would give us advice about life.

Had you spoken to him after that?

I spoke with him about a month and a half ago. He could make a local call, and my family in Saudi Arabia would call us and put the phones together so we could speak to him. He was always optimistic. He was always saying nothing would happen unless God wants that thing to happen. He was always trying to make us feel better. He was always telling us: If something is going happen, even if the whole world gathers to stop it, it’s going to happen, so don’t blame yourself.

How did you feel when you learned he was dead?

At first it was a big shock. It wasn’t easy at all. We are still deeply sad about what happened to him. But I have this feeling that he is in a better place right now, and they can’t reach him and torture him and bother him anymore.

Saudi Arabia says he founded a terrorist cell and advocated an armed insurgency against the government.

I have a simple response: Do they have any proof of that? All my father’s speeches are on the Internet. Anyone can go and hear them. If you want to make an accusation, they should bring at least one proof. They can’t.

What did your father do that angered the Saudi government so much?

He was always standing up to the oppressor. He wouldn’t keep silent if the government cracked down on the protesters, or if the government killed someone among the protesters. And he would talk about freedom and justice, which would drive the government mad.

He would say: Don’t use violence, because the government wants to provoke you so they will have a legitimate reason to shoot you. The government got mad because they want to use violence against people to make them quiet about their rights and their freedom.

He was a sectarian leader on some level though, wasn’t he? He was seen as being very much a Shia leader.

He was a Shia figure because he’s Shia. But he was not sectarian. He defended Shias and Sunnis on the same level. He always believed that sectarianism is just a division that the government created among people so the government could control both of them. It would make the Sunnis afraid of the Shias and it would make the Shias afraid of the Sunnis.

How are Shias treated in Saudi Arabia?

When I was in the second grade they would impose their religious beliefs on us—their ideology, Wahhabism. That belief says that we are non-Muslims and Wahhabism is the only correct way of Islam. That was a big shock for me as a kid. Imagine a kid in the second grade studying things that say you are not respected and your belief is wrong and basically your blood is not protected because your beliefs are not Islam.

Why did the Saudi government execute your father?

They don’t want anyone to become like my dad. They don’t want anyone to speak out and say what’s going on inside that country. They don’t understand that it’s 2016 and everyone has access to the Internet. They still think they’re living alone in a small box and no one can see them. They don’t understand that the whole world is watching.

How do you feel about your father’s activities?

I’m proud of what he did. I believe we need more people like my father in our country so we can get ride of this tyrant.

Will there be others like him, or will his execution stifle dissent?

I do believe there’s going to be more people like him in the future. The government ignites people more and more with the execution. People now—not just in my country but around the world—can see what kind of ideology the Saudi government has, their intolerance of people who are different than them. Basically, they can’t tolerate anyone. And that intolerance is going to be spread all over the world. You can see al-Qaeda; you can see ISIS. They all have the same ideology: Wahhabism. And Wahhabism is the first ally of the Saudi government.

How should the outside world respond to your father’s execution, and to Saudi Arabia’s broader violations of human rights?

Any country that values freedom, justice and dignity and humanity for people should respond to that action by at least condemning the action.

Even if they are going to bring a big profit, Canada should think who’s going to use these weapons and for what? Do they tolerate those actions? Do they have the conscience to live with that?

The Saudis have allegedly said they will not use these armoured vehicles against civilian populations.

I don’t have to say anything about that. You can see the United Nations reports about Yemen [where Saudi Arabia is leading a military intervention against Shia rebels]. Who destroys schools? Who destroys hospitals? Who destroys most of the civilians? You can see who they use the weapons against. And if they use them against civilians in Yemen, that won’t stop them from using them against civilians in Saudi Arabia.

How realistic is that concern—that the light armoured vehicles might be used against civilians in Saudi Arabia?

If any place has a serious movement against [the Saudi government], they are going to use [the weapons]. Nothing is going to stop them from moving them. They are brutal. They don’t care about human life.

Is there anything else you’d like to say about your dad?

We are still requesting the body, and they are not giving it back. We don’t know why. We don’t know what they did to the body. We don’t know if they did something to my father before they executed him. We want the body so all my family can say goodbye to him and give him a proper burial.

Do you know how your father was killed?

]]>Novel cut from Israeli school curriculum becomes bestsellerhttp://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/novel-cut-from-israeli-school-curriculum-becomes-bestseller/
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/novel-cut-from-israeli-school-curriculum-becomes-bestseller/#commentsFri, 29 Jan 2016 10:42:10 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=827547Borderlife, a novel about an Israeli-Palestinian romance, will be translated into English later this year

Israeli author Dorit Rabinyan poses with her Hebrew-language novel titled “Gader Haya” (known in English as “Borderlife”) on December 31, 2015 at her house in Tel Aviv. (Gil Cohen/AFP/Getty Images)

A novel by an Israeli author about a love affair between an Israeli Jewish woman and a Palestinian Muslim man from the West Bank who meet in New York has been excluded from Israel’s regular high school curriculum, out of concern it might threaten the Jewish identity of students reading it.

The book, written by Dorit Rabinyan and known in English as Borderlife, was recommended for inclusion in the curriculum of upper high school grades by a committee advising the education ministry, which nevertheless decided against it. “Young people of adolescent age tend to romanticize and don’t, in many cases, have the systemic vision that includes considerations involving maintaining the national-ethnic identity of the people and the significance of miscegenation,” a senior ministry official said, according to Ha’aretz, an Israeli newspaper. (The Hebrew word translated by Ha’aretz as “miscegenation” can also mean “assimilation.”) The ofﬁcial, in other words, feared that reading the book might lead students to accept as normal romance between Jews and Muslims.

The education ministry later backtracked to some degree and said the book could be taught in advanced literature classes, but would not be part of the regular curriculum, according to Ha’aretz.

In an interview, Rabinyan describes the novel’s central romance as one in which the protagonists for the first time discover a member of their homeland’s opposite community as an individual. Hilmi, the Palestinian, is simply Hilmi, a man. And Liat “is no longer her Israeli people, her Israeli country, army, government. She’s herself.”

At the same time, Rabinyan says, every individual is shaped by the soil on which they grow, and she wanted to explore the resulting tensions when the two characters connect. “What I was looking into was the power of love to drift us into each other’s identity, and to have our mutual third identity that is born be a threat, be the one that can colour us with the loved one’s colours, and take over and maybe swallow ourselves and our original identity,” she says.

Rabinyan drew on her own past when writing the book. “I did live a year in New York. I did meet a group of young Palestinians who impressed me and really made me tick in a way that inspired me.” But she says that when writing literature, memories are not enough. “We have to add a portion of fantasy.”

The political undertones of the book might not have been Rabinyan’s primary concern, but they are unavoidable. The symbiosis of the couple, she says, is like the symbiosis of Palestinians and Israelis inhabiting the same land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. “We have no borderlines between us, and we have no definition of our identities in ways that usually two neighbours have, and this is why we treat one another in such a way that maintains the conflict to be more than just a fight of two gangs over territory,” she says.

Instead, says Rabinyan, the conﬂict is defined as an existential question of identity. “It’s a matter of the Jewish DNA being threatened by the surrounding Arab culture,” and it is this fear of being swallowed that justifies—demands, even—Jews’ isolation from their Palestinian neighbours.

Fear that her book might somehow erode Jewish Israeli isolationism was a reason behind the education ministry’s hostility toward it, says Rabinyan, who describes herself as a Zionist committed to Israel as a Jewish and democratic state within its 1967 borders. “The zeitgeist in Israel nowadays is to eliminate anything that might [encourage] dialogue,” she says.

It would be absurd to suggest that any book could lead to any significant dilution of Jewish Israeli identity through intermarriage with Palestinians. The number of such unions in Israel is minuscule. Even the fictional characters in Borderlife meet outside Israel, and the relationship ends because Liat prioritizes returning home. The book’s threat, such that it is, arises from humanizing one’s enemy. “It might widen something that is being kept shut,” says Rabinyan.

If that prospect unnerves some in Israel’s education ministry, many Israelis seem open to it. Sales of Borderlife, already strong before this controversy, are surging. An English translation will be published this year. As for its exclusion from the Israeli high school curriculum, Rabinyan notes there is no more effective way to convince a teenager to read a book than by telling her she shouldn’t. When Rabinyan was young, she stole a David Grossman novel after a librarian told her she couldn’t borrow it because it supposedly wasn’t suited to someone her age.

Something similar might happen with Borderlife, which would suit Rabinyan fine. “I didn’t write the book to be taught,” she says. “I wrote it to be read.”

Cindor Reeves, the 38-year-old brother-in-law of former Liberian dictator Charles Taylor. Reeves is widely credited with taking down the former dictator and stopping the trade in blood diamonds. (RICK EGLINTON/Toronto Star/Getty Images)

Canada knew when it began deportation proceedings against Cindor Reeves in 2011 that it might have been sending him to his death. Late last year in Liberia, where Reeves returned after being forced from Canada, seven men tried to kill him. They almost succeeded.

The aspiring assassins came for Reeves because of the role he played in bringing to justice Charles Taylor, a former warlord and president of Liberia who is now serving a 50-year sentence for aiding and abetting war crimes and crimes against humanity. Taylor was convicted because he sponsored the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in next-door Sierra Leone, a nihilistic militia of men and children who fought a civil war there from 1991 to 2002 and, while high on cocaine and gunpowder, hacked the limbs of civilian victims and ate human flesh. Taylor sent the RUF weapons, and the RUF sent Taylor blood diamonds.

Reeves was Taylor’s brother-in-law. He entered Taylor’s household as a teenager after Taylor married Reeves’s sister, Agnes. He also helped Taylor smuggle guns and diamonds between Liberia and Sierra Leone. But Reeves secretly turned against Taylor and began co-operating with the Special Court for Sierra Leone, helping the international tribunal build its case against him.

Last November, Reeves was sleeping on a mattress on the floor of his home in Monrovia (to keep away from the windows) when the men came to kill him. He recognized three of them. One, says Reeves, is the bodyguard of a prominent and wealthy Liberian who was formerly a close associate of Charles Taylor.

The assailants, carrying Kalashnikov assault rifles, opened fire. They couldn’t get into the house but shot through its walls, screaming at Reeves as they did so. “Did you think you could come back here after what you did to Pappy?” they yelled, referring to Taylor by an affectionate nickname. “This is the last day you will live.”

Reeves ran, dove and scrambled. A bullet hit him in the leg. He smashed his face. The men left, Reeves tells Maclean’s in a telephone interview from a location where he is now hiding.

Reeves lay still, bleeding and terrified. Where could he go? A hospital seemed too risky. He no longer knew whom he could trust.

A friend came to Reeves’s home and dug the bullet out of his leg with a knife. When Reeves was well enough to travel, he fled Monrovia.

Reeves first came to Canada in 2006 from Germany, where he had been living under a false identity in a witness protection program arranged by the Special Court after Taylor learned of Reeves’s betrayal and tried to kill him for it.

The witness protection program was poorly run. German authorities depended on regular reimbursements from the Special Court, which were not always dispersed on time, according to a 2009 affidavit by Alan White, chief of investigations at the Special Court from 2002 to 2005.

Reeves felt abandoned. He worried about the permanency of his legal status in Germany, and his safety there. Without the court’s permission, he bought plane tickets to Canada for his wife and three children. When they arrived at Toronto’s Pearson airport he told officials who he was and asked for asylum.

During refugee application proceedings over the next several years, Canadian officials learned the value of Reeves’s co-operation with the Special Court.

“I can affirm that Cindor Reeves is one of the very few who had the courage to risk his life and the life of his family and collaborate with the office of the prosecutor in Freetown at a time when no one else dared to talk about the involvement of Charles Taylor with the RUF,” wrote Alain Blaise Werner, who worked in that office, in a 2010 affidavit given to Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board.

In his affidavit, White described Reeves’s assistance as “invaluable” and “outstanding.” White added: “In his effort to bring peace and security to the region he endangered himself and his family, yet he did so willingly without asking anything in return but for protection for his family. The court owes Mr. Reeves a debt of gratitude for his support and service.”

Canadian officials also knew that in the opinion of those at the Special Court who deeply probed the crimes committed during the civil wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia, Reeves’s personal culpability was limited. While Reeves never denied he participated in running guns and diamonds, Brenda Hollis, then-prosecutor for the Special Court, in a 2010 letter told Vic Toews, then Canada’s minister of public safety: “According to our information, at no time was Reeves in a high position within the Taylor regime.” Reeves’s knowledge of Taylor’s criminal activities stemmed from his familial connections to him, she said.

“I don’t have any direct evidence that he was someone who perpetuated war crimes and crimes against humanity,” David Michael Crane, the Special Court’s chief prosecutor from 2002 to 2005, told Maclean’s in 2009. “He is certainly not somebody that I would have prosecuted.”

Finally, Canadian officials knew the risks Reeves would face in Liberia from Charles Taylor supporters who hadn’t forgiven Reeves for helping send the dictator to jail. They would seek him out, White wrote in his affidavit. “He and his family would undoubtedly be in fear for their lives.”

Canadian officials knew all this, but when weighing Reeves’s refugee case, they disregarded it. The Immigration and Refugee Board’s refugee protection division concluded there were serious reasons to believe Reeves had committed war crimes and crimes against humanity, and that he should therefore be excluded from refugee protection under Article 1F of the United Nations Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees. It produced no evidence of his direct involvement in these alleged crimes.

The decision to deny Reeves refugee protection did not solely come down to Canada’s immigration and refugee bureaucracy. Canada’s then-Conservative government, through the minister of public safety, intervened directly in the case to argue against Canada accepting Reeves as a refugee.

The Immigration and Refugee Board did allow Reeves’s then-wife and children to stay in Canada. It reasoned their relationship with Reeves made it too dangerous for them to return to Liberia with him.

Reeves was issued with a removal order but was not immediately deported. When he did leave Canada, in 2012, it was before he had exhausted all his options that might have extended his stay here. He had always spoken highly of Canada, but after six years fighting to stay he was also dejected and frustrated. He separated from his wife and faced starting his life over again.

The Netherlands granted Reeves landed immigrant status shortly after he left Canada. He didn’t stay there long, though. Despite everything that had happened to him in Liberia, he said he wanted to help build it. He had aspirations to run for political office and began returning to Liberia and nearby countries for extended stays. In phone calls with Maclean’s during that time, Reeves sounded unexpectedly optimistic—about his future and Liberia’s.

Even when Ebola swept through Liberia in 2014, killing and spreading crippling fear, Reeves refused to leave for somewhere safer. “This is when people need to see leaders,” he said. “People know Taylor is not coming back,” Reeves responded when asked whether he was worried about his safety. Taylor’s old supporters, he wanted to believe, had little reason to hold a grudge.

Not everyone was ready to move on. People Reeves passed on the streets of Monrovia uttered threats. He took some precautions—avoiding windows in his home, for example. But until the men with assault rifles came for him, he thought the risks were acceptable.

Reeves has now relocated again. He’s keeping a low profile. He’s not sure what to do next. It’s hard to know how safe he will ever be. People have wanted Reeves dead for years. Killing him got easier once Canada turned him away.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/deported-refugee-cindor-reeves-fears-for-his-life-in-liberia/feed/2How Litvinenko’s poisoning fits into Putin’s power playhttp://www.macleans.ca/news/world/how-litvinenkos-poisoning-fits-into-putins-power-play/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/how-litvinenkos-poisoning-fits-into-putins-power-play/#commentsMon, 25 Jan 2016 18:28:04 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=826627Everything Vladimir Putin has done to reassert Russian power has seemed farfetched, outlandish and inconceivable—until he did it

A British inquiry into the death by poisoning of ex-Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko in London 10 years ago paints a picture of Russian President Vladimir Putin that is every bit as sinister as the most lurid caricatures of the former spy that have emerged in the 16 years he has led Russia—as either president or prime minister.

Litvinenko, by the time of his death a British citizen who was critical of Putin and had worked with British intelligence, died from radioactive polonium poisoning after having tea in a London hotel with former Russian agents Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitri Kovtun.

Inquiry chair Sir Robert Owen said the two men killed Litvinenko, and it was probable that they did so with Putin’s approval. The report alleges Kovtun told a witness Litvinenko would be poisoned rather than shot “to set an example.” Owen said the polonium used to kill Litvinenko likely came from a Russian reactor.

The Russian president, in other words, is accused of orchestrating in a Western capital the murder of a man who betrayed him—which is exactly what Litvinenko accused Putin of before finally succumbing.

This act, like much of what Putin has done during his time in office, seemed almost inconceivable—until, allegedly, he did it.

Who would have believed, almost a generation after the end of the Cold War, that a Russian president would dispatch assassins to London? But then who would have believed—until Putin ordered it in 2014—that Russia would invade Ukraine?

It’s this utter brazenness—to say nothing of a disregard for law and, in the case of Russia’s annexation of Crimea, signed treaties—that makes it so difficult to predict what Russia under Putin will do next.

‘Justice must be done’: Evan Solomon interviews the U.K.’s High Commissioner to Canada on the Litvinenko case.

But it’s also a trait that Putin has deployed with consistently surprising skill throughout his political career.

This year Putin will watch his third American counterpart prepare to leave office. He’s outlasted Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and will soon see the back of Barack Obama.

Putin’s longevity compared to American presidents owes something to the Russian constitution, which allows someone to sit for more than two terms provided they are not consecutive, but it also cannot be denied that he is, in the words of Maria Lipman, a Moscow-based analyst affiliated with George Washington University, “a brilliant tactician.”

Russia’s seizure of Crimea was accomplished with such speed, deception and outright cynicism that Western powers could do—or chose to do—nothing to stop it.

Within a year, following a Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine disguised as a domestic uprising, the leaders of France, Germany, Ukraine and Russia met in Minsk, Belarus, to hammer out a deal aimed at stopping the fighting. To a large extent, it did. But by freezing the conflict, the agreement also cemented Russian gains in Ukraine.

Europeans disinclined to keep up the pressure on Moscow could portray Minsk as evidence of Russia’s good behaviour. “But in doing so, they have to conveniently forget the whole issue of Crimea and of Ukrainian integrity,” says Keir Giles, an associate fellow in the Russia and Eurasia Program at Chatham House. He adds some European leaders have “demonstrated quite clearly that they’re willing to do so.” In that outcome is another victory for Putin: the creation of divisions among his Western opponents.

Last year, equally unexpectedly, Putin sent his armed forces to Syria to protect his ally, the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, by dropping bombs on those Syrians—including groups supported by America—trying to overthrow him. With one move, he ensured there would be no solution, not even a credible attempt at achieving one, in that civil war-ravaged country without Russia.

“[The Russian] vision of world order is one where a couple of great powers dominate: the United States; Russia; China maybe; maybe some of the larger European powers, at least in the European context. And they’re fully sovereign. They get to do what they want,” says Jeffrey Mankoff, deputy director of the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“But international relations is still ultimately based on power, and the smaller countries have to adapt. They have to adapt to the interests of the larger powers, because the larger powers have the ability to compel them.”

Russia was not a great power when Putin took office—not really. It had nuclear weapons, but also severe economic and social instability overseen by a drunken president, Boris Yeltsin. Putin made Russia seem serious again. He wanted more than that. He wanted to push back at what he felt was encroachment by NATO and the European Union on Russia’s western borders—in those smaller countries that he believes don’t get to do what they want.

This culminated in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. While a tactical success, it resulted in some larger strategic setbacks. Moscow might have bitten off a chunk of eastern Ukraine, but the rest of the country is lost to it forever. More importantly, from Putin’s perspective, Russia also found itself sanctioned and shunned—to varying degrees—by Western powers.

What’s driving Russian policy now, says Lilia Shevtsova, a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, is a desire to end Russia’s isolation. “The Kremlin’s agenda is firstly to return back to the role of the superpower at the table with other key international actors,” she says.

But she says Putin doesn’t intend to achieve this by persuasion or by making concessions, but by forcing the West to compromise. “The usual Putin and Kremlin way to pursue their goals is to apply pressure, to break windows in order to achieve the grand bargain. It’s blackmail. It’s forcing the object of a love affair.”

Russia’s tool, says Shevtsova, is Syria, where Russia is mostly bombing rebel groups other than the so-called Islamic State, a jihadist outfit that is also targeted by a U.S.-led coalition. But Putin has nevertheless called for a partnership between Russia and the West to destroy the group. This, says, Shevtsova, is a ruse.

“He doesn’t care about Assad. He doesn’t care about Syria. He doesn’t care about an anti-terrorist front. They’re means to him,” she says. “The key goal is to return to the status quo ante, before 2014, to return Russia as a great power to a concert of Western powers.

Shevtsova thinks that Putin’s goal of ending Russia’s isolation and forcing the West to deal with it more as an equal will curb the Kremlin from further military adventures like those it carried out in Ukraine.

Giles isn’t so sure. “There are plenty of other things around Russia’s periphery that are accidents waiting to happen, just the same way that Ukraine was,” he says.

The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, all of which belong to NATO and have ethnic Russian minorities, are obvious examples. A snap Russian military exercise could be diverted to seize territory in Latvia, for example, he says.

The goal would not be to reacquire the Baltic states, but to trigger NATO’s Article 5 principle of collective defence, which says that an attack on one member state must be considered an attack on them all. If NATO members then failed to defend Latvia—and given Russia’s military might, that’s possible—NATO would be exposed as a paper tiger that can offer nothing to countries hoping to join the alliance, such as Georgia or Ukraine.

“It would resolve Russia’s NATO security problem at a stroke by provoking an Article 5 situation [and] making sure there was no consensus. And then NATO’s whole raison d’etre evaporates,” he says.

If it sounds far-fetched, it is less so now than at any time since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Putin wants to reassert Russian power and influence in the world, and especially in the former Soviet sphere of influence: Eastern Europe, the Baltics and Central Asia. He wants Russia to be treated as an equal partner by the West, and he’s willing to “break windows,” as Shevtsova puts it, to make that happen.

Putin faces little domestic pressure to act with restraint. “Any ideas to challenge him, to challenge his policies, appear suicidal. You don’t challenge a leader who enjoys almost 90 per cent popularity of the people,” says Lipman.

All this means relations between Russia and the West will likely not soon be smooth. The West should probably prepare for further crises and confrontations. The British inquiry into Litvinenko’s death suggests these won’t involve many scruples from Putin.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/how-litvinenkos-poisoning-fits-into-putins-power-play/feed/2Why is Canada making arms deals with the Saudis?http://www.macleans.ca/politics/worldpolitics/why-is-canada-making-arms-deals-with-the-saudis/
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/worldpolitics/why-is-canada-making-arms-deals-with-the-saudis/#commentsThu, 14 Jan 2016 11:31:55 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=821683The Conservative and Liberal governments alike are ready to make deals with the human-rights-abusing nation

Saudi special security forces show their skills during a military parade at a base near Mount Arafat, southeast of the holy city of Mecca, on November 22, 2009. (Mahmud Hams/AFP/Getty Images)

Canada’s new Liberal government is learning that righteous indignation regarding foreign policy is easier out of office than in.

A federal Crown corporation under Canada’s previous Conservative government brokered a $15-billion deal to sell weaponized armoured vehicles that will be manufactured by General Dynamics Land Systems in London, Ont., to Saudi Arabia’s National Guard. After the deal was announced in 2014, Gerald Butts, principal adviser to Liberal leader Justin Trudeau, took to Twitter to pour scorn on the Conservatives. “Principled foreign policy indeed,” he wrote while retweeting a post that compared Saudi Arabia to the so-called Islamic State terrorist group. Butts remained Trudeau’s chief adviser after the election.

Roland Paris, then a professor at the University of Ottawa and now a senior adviser to Trudeau on foreign policy, told the CBC last fall that because we didn’t know whether Canada had obtained assurances from the Saudis that they wouldn’t use arms against civilians, “we’ve allowed an arms sale to trump human rights.”

The Liberals are now letting the arms deal go ahead, with explanations that have shifted from Trudeau’s claim that the cannon-mounted machines are just “jeeps” to Foreign Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion’s statement that Canada’s allies are selling weapons to Saudi Arabia, too.

Dion has reportedly said the Saudis have committed not to use the vehicles against civilians, but the department of Global Affairs Canada could not, by the time this article went to press, provide Maclean’s with details about those alleged assurances—which in any case would be next to meaningless. What government has ever said it plans to kill innocent civilians? The fact remains that the vehicles are going to a country with a horrendous human rights record and will be used by its National Guard, which is tasked with protecting against internal threats.

The Conservatives now say the government should publicize its assessment, if it has conducted one, of what the arms deal will mean for human rights in Saudi Arabia—something the Tories refused to do while in office.

Lost in all this posturing is the question of exactly what sort of relationship Canada has with the Saudi kingdom, and why it is seeking to deepen its commercial aspects. Speaking to the CBC, Canada’s former foreign minister John Baird said Saudi Arabia and Canada don’t share many values but have common interests. A list of these would include: opposition to Iran; support—muted in Saudi Arabia’s case—for Israel; a stable global oil market; and, ostensibly, opposition to terrorist outfits such as al-Qaeda and Islamic State. Saudi Arabia’s ruling House of Saud also presents itself as a force for stability in the region, warning that what might follow its overthrow would be infinitely worse even than a regime that beheads people for “sorcery.”

Britain is also an ally of Saudi Arabia. Pressed by a journalist recently about why Britain supported Saudi Arabia’s should-have-been-farcical bid to sit on the United Nations Human Rights Council, Prime Minister David Cameron was more forthright than Western politicians typically are on the matter. “We have a relationship with Saudi Arabia, and if you want to know why, I’ll tell you why,” he replied testily. “It is because we receive from them important intelligence and security information that keeps us safe.”

But according to Wesley Wark, a visiting professor at the University of Ottawa’s graduate school of public and international affairs: “The Saudi regime is notoriously difficult even for much closer allies than ourselves to exchange intelligence with. This has been a problem that the Americans have had for a very long time.” Canada enjoys a close intelligence-sharing relationship with America, and presumably is privy to at least part of what Saudi Arabia is willing to share with Washington as a result. But as for bilateral co-operation, “every indication is that our intelligence relationship is almost non-existent,” says Wark.

Complicating matters is Saudi Arabia’s habit of funding religious schools and mosques around the world that adhere to its extreme and intolerant Wahhabi version of Islam. Saudi Arabia has backed jihadist groups, too, notes Thomas Juneau, formerly a strategic analyst at the Department of National Defence and now an assistant professor at the University of Ottawa’s graduate school of public and international affairs. “That being said, Saudi Arabia is target No. 1, or close to target No. 1, for al-Qaeda or Islamic State,” he adds. “Saudi Arabia is actively fighting against these groups, like we are.”

Did these factors influence the former Conservative government’s decision to push for the arms deal, or the current Liberal decision to let it go ahead? Probably not. The deal may open doors in Saudi Arabia for Canadian diplomats and businesses. Juneau calls it “a nice business card.” But it’s not going to fundamentally change Canada’s security relationship with Saudi Arabia.

Raihan Abir escaped a wave of murderous attacks on secular and atheist writers by Islamist extremists in Bangladesh and found refuge in Canada. But he is still threatened with death.

In September, the Islamist group Ansarullah Bangla Team published a hit list online of some 20 secular Bangladeshi writers and activists living abroad. “Let Bangladesh revoke the citizenship of these enemies of Islam,” read an accompanying statement. “If not, we will hunt them down in whatever part of God’s world we find them and kill them right there.”

Among those threatened was Abir, editor of Mukto-mona, a bilingual English-Bengali website and blog dedicated to freethinking and science. He has been living in Canada since June.

Abir regularly received death threats by text message and email while still in Bangladesh. “It’s not uncommon for Islamic extremists to attack writers and secular people, so I was keeping myself away from going to public meetings and rallies so people don’t track me,” he says. “I was taking these kind of precautions because we have to. But in 2015, it got out of control.”

Several of Abir’s secular friends and colleagues in Bangladesh were hacked to death last year—including Avijit Roy, who co-founded Mukto-mona with his wife, Raﬁda Bonya Ahmed, and who co-authored the book Philosophy of Disbelief with Abir.

Roy and Ahmed, visiting Bangladesh from their home in America, were set upon by a mob of machete-wielding extremists in a crowded Dhaka street in February. Roy died. Ahmed was badly wounded, losing a thumb in the attack. The two reportedly lay bleeding on the ground for an hour before they were taken to hospital.

Also murdered in 2015 were Ananta Bijoy Das, a blogger and editor of Philosophy of Disbelief; Faisal Arefin Dipan, who published it; Niloy Chatterjee, who wrote for Mukto-mona and was a university friend of Abir’s; and atheist blogger Washiqur Rahman.

Bangladeshi activists shout slogans as they march in the street with mock coffins that symbolize the murder of secular publishers and bloggers by Islamic extremists, in Dhaka on November 5, 2015. (Munir Uz Zaman/AFP/Getty Images.)

“I felt like it is my social responsibility. I want Bangladesh to be a secular country. It is a secular country, but it is being hacked by Islamic extremist people,” says Abir, explaining why he continued to write despite the consequential danger.

“The fear of Islamic extremists is that we are enlightening people. We are talking about injustices. We are talking about superstitious things. That’s why secular people, the people of Mukto-mona, are being targeted.

“They always have the excuse: ‘You are writing against our Prophet. You write against Islam. You get money from Jews, and that’s why you are defaming Islam.’ These are all kinds of excuses. Mukto-mona actually is not for criticizing Islam. It is not for criticizing Muhammad. It’s a website for writing about science, writing about secularism, humanism, all kinds of values.”

Abir came to Canada in June to attend a biomedical engineering conference and stayed, claiming asylum in September after his pregnant wife joined him. The family was given refugee status in November.

“I kept it very secret that I was in Canada, but somehow they knew,” he says, referring to the hit list that was published in September. “I can’t say 100 per cent that I am safe. But I feel safe. In Dhaka I used to wear a helmet all the time and look back while walking forward, but here I don’t do that.”

Abir says he has been visited by an officer from CSIS, Canada’s spy agency, who told him to pass on information about any threats he does receive. He has not stopped writing and continues to edit Mukto-mona from his home in Toronto. He plans to complete his Ph.D. in biomedical engineering, and will have to defend his thesis from Canada. But ultimately, he says, he’s hopeful about Bangladesh’s future.

“Because this dark side, this kind of thing, never [wins]. Maybe they do atrocities, maybe they will kill us. But they won’t be winning in the long run. So we’ll have to keep on doing what we do—keep informing people about science, about reason, about humanism.”

Ukraine's necessary tools

“I'm from Donetsk. In spring 2014 it became clear that without weapons it will be hard. A week after i bought a rifle, the house where I stayed with my friends was attacked by armed people. I had to shoot. Probably, it saved our lives.” Alexey, 29 years old, businessman, in his apartment in Brovary with rifle, which he bought in April 2014 in Donetsk. (Andrey Lomakin)

1. Ukraine's necessary tools

“I'm from Donetsk. In spring 2014 it became clear that without weapons it will be hard. A week after i bought a rifle, the house where I stayed with my friends was attacked by armed people. I had to shoot. Probably, it saved our lives.” Alexey, 29 years old, businessman, in his apartment in Brovary with rifle, which he bought in April 2014 in Donetsk. (Andrey Lomakin)

2. Ukraine's necessary tools

“Every man should learn at least how to drive a car and how to shoot a gun. You’ve got to learn shooting so you can stop a criminal when he attacks. There’s no need to kill, but you have to stop him. I do not think much about staying safe for myself - but I really do care for security of my four kids and my wife.”Lubomyr, 42 years old, financial expert, in his apartment in Kiev with rifle, which he bought in 2014 to protect his family. (Andrey Lomakin)

3. Ukraine's necessary tools

“Having gun at home I’m feel myself fully confident in terms of protection my home and my family. Despite the fact that gun storing unloaded in safe I need less than one minute to load it and be ready to use it in case of danger.” Alexey, 40 years old, IT group manager, in his apartment in Kiev with shotgun, which he bought in April 2014 to protect his family. (Andrey Lomakin)

4. Ukraine's necessary tools

“I am sure that passing an adequate law for weapons regulation would reduce crimes amount dramatically. Any criminal would think twice before attacking someone who is potentially armed. It’s like a box of full of sweets with one poisoned sweet inside – no one would dare for trying any of them.”Maxim, 31 years old, maritime logistics expert, in his apartment in Kiev with rifle, which he bought in 2013. (Andrey Lomakin)

5. Ukraine's necessary tools

“I’ve been practicing martial arts for years, but there was not a single time in my life I’ve had to use my skills. Confident man possesses strong energetics, so I am sure carrying a gun would keep me out of all situations that might require actual use of it. I’m not willing to shoot live beings – I only practice in a shooting range, but if there is a real threat to my family – I’m going to shoot with no doubt.“Stepan, 41 years old, painter, in his house in Kiev with rifle, which he bought in 2014. (Andrey Lomakin)

6. Ukraine's necessary tools

“My hobby is hunting. But I would use the shotgun without a doubt to protect my family - but within the bounds of the law. I am graduate in law and understand my own responsibility for all my activities.”Alexander, 39 years old, co-owner of the evaluating company, in his apartment in Kiev with shotgun, which he bought 2010 for hunting. (Andrey Lomakin)

7. Ukraine's necessary tools

“I think everyone has the right for protection of himself, family and belongings. But every owner should perfectly master his weapon, security rules and clearly understand when to use it. Especially when there’s a shotgun in your hands.”Elena, 37 years old, marketing expert , in her house near Kiev with shotgun, which she bought in 2014 to protect her family. (Andrey Lomakin)

8. Ukraine's necessary tools

“Unforeseen situation in the country forced me to decide on weapon. Now it slowly turns to a hobby: visiting a shooting saloon, buying something new to upgrade the rifle. The weapon at home definitely disciplines and raises the responsibility level.”Eugene, 36 years old, sales manager, in his apartment in Kiev with rifle, which he bought in March 2014 to protect his family. (Andrey Lomakin)

9. Ukraine's necessary tools

“The gun was bought during the Orange revolution. That was a tumultuous time such as now. With a gun I feel reassured when I am going for a walk with my child and in particular if my husband is not around. Fortunately, I never had to use the gun.”Tatyana, 39 years old, police officer, in her apartment in Kiev with traumatic gun, which she bought in 2003 to protect her child. (Andrey Lomakin)

10. Ukraine's necessary tools

“The man should be able to do many things by himself. In particular, protect his family. I am ready to use a weapon for protection of my own house. The first two rounds in the shotgun are traumatic, the next are shots and then the buckshot. Only the last two are bullets.” Roman, 37 years old, painter, in his house near Kiev with shotgun, which he bought in June 2014 to protect his family. (Andrey Lomakin)

Ukrainian photographer Andrey Lomakin says his fellow citizens’ attitude toward guns changed after the Maidan Revolution of 2014 in which the country’s pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, was ousted following months of street demonstrations and the deaths of scores of protesters at the hands of security forces. “Maidan was a tipping point,” he says. “Two years ago, weapons owners were hunters or people who like to shoot targets in a shooting gallery. Nowadays almost all owners consider their guns for self-defence first.”

Lomakin has tried to capture this change in a series of photographs he calls Amulet, because of the talisman-like sense of security some Ukrainians now derive from their firearms. They are not like soldiers, Lomakin says of his subjects. “They are ordinary people who simply want to protect their family and houses like anyone in the world. Not everyone is comfortable to point a weapon at the aggressor and shoot, but everyone feels safer having one.”

Lomakin says he began looking for subjects through friends and acquaintances who had bought weapons during and after the Maidan protests. They introduced him to others, and eventually he built a network. He says it was important to interview his subjects before photographing them in order to build trust. The results are apparent in the photos—most of which were shot in the subjects’ homes and reflect a familiar intimacy. Some of Lomakin’s subjects appear to cradle their weapons almost affectionately. Their guns are like sports cars, Lomakin says, that can be upgraded with fancy scopes and the like. But most of his subjects, he says, consider their guns to be necessary tools—“like a computer, washing machine or fridge.”

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/in-ukraine-a-gun-becomes-a-necessary-tool/feed/1Germany’s new problem with refugeeshttp://www.macleans.ca/news/world/germanys-new-problem-with-refugees/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/germanys-new-problem-with-refugees/#commentsThu, 07 Jan 2016 19:11:05 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=818935The attacks in Cologne have changed perceptions of migrants and maybe the nation's willingness to embrace them

Police officers survey the area in front of the main train station and the Cathedral in Cologne, western Germany, on January 6, 2016, where dozens of apparently coordinated sexual assaults were perpetred against women on New Year’s Eve. MAJA HITIJ/AFP/Getty Images

Considering that upwards of one million migrants and refugees poured into Germany in 2015—about five times the number of arrivals during the previous year—the level of social peace and the sense of hospitality that had prevailed until now in Germany is remarkable.

There was some backlash to the refugee influx last year. PEGIDA, a right-wing, anti-Islam movement, could draw about 10,000 people on to the streets at rallies in the fall. And German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who broke with her decade-long practice of cautious incrementalism to throw open Germany’s doors to migrants, saw her seemingly impervious political armour dented. Her own finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, in November criticized her for triggering an “avalanche” of refugees into Germany with what he likened to a bit of careless skiing.

Yet in her New Year’s Eve address to Germans, Merkel felt confident enough to double-down on her refugee policy. Wearing a festive red dress, she acknowledged the “major challenge” presented by integrating so many refugees but said they were also an “opportunity” for the country’s future. Germany can meet the challenge, she said.

The challenges—including providing housing, health care and schooling for so many, so quickly—are real. Nevertheless, when Merkel spoke those words, many of her fellow citizens likely agreed with her. But the chancellor’s timing was terrible.

Elsewhere in Germany that night, events were taking place that may severely erode Germans’ willingness to accept so many newcomers, and at the same time weaken the the German chancellor who’s seen as responsible for inviting them in the first place.

On the crowded public square outside Cologne’s main train station, more than 100 women were sexually assaulted or robbed by gangs of men described as appearing to be Arab or North African. The men, hundreds of them, surrounded the women and prevented them from leaving while stealing their phones and wallets and groping them. At least two women were allegedly raped. Similar attacks took place in Hamburg and Stuttgart.

Germans are furious—at what they say was the slow response of the police, at the absence of any arrests (as of Wednesday night), and at the initially tepid reaction to the attacks by German media. Some anti-migrant activists and commentators have said media organizations downplayed or ignored the assaults because they didn’t want to stir anger directed against refugees in Germany.

German authorities have said there’s no evidence that any of the refugees who recently arrived in Germany were among the attackers. Cologne is an ethnically diverse city, and it’s possible the attackers have been in Germany for years or were born there.

But that the attackers appear to have origins in the same parts of the world from where Germany’s more recent influx of migrants comes will inevitably colour the debate about Germany’s current migration policy.

Germans know their country is rich. Many take pride in the leading role it has played in meeting the migrant crisis facing Europe and were likely willing to shoulder their share of the resulting financial burden resulting, at least in the short term, from absorbing so many migrants. Many were also willing to embrace an evolving German identity that is no longer as tied to ethnicity as it once was.

But the attacks in Cologne were something different. They are perceived by some as reflecting an unbridgeable gap—especially concerning the rights of women—between Arab and Muslim cultures and values, and German ones. The challenge faced by Merkel and others attempting to convince Germans that they can and should welcome hundreds of thousands of migrants is now more difficult.

Q: When your mother sent you and your brother Hazrat away from Afghanistan, she told you not to come back, no matter how bad things got. Why?

I’ve seen some pretty bad things in Afghanistan, some horrific and inhumane actions. But she saw more killing and more bloodshed than I have. And I think she understood the implication of us staying was we would most certainly be killed—either by the Americans or the Afghan government or the Taliban.

Q: Were there specific threats against you?

My uncle was involved in the Taliban. He was a commander and had been working with them for many years. Because of that, when the Taliban government collapsed, it was a problem for us. My family members, including my father and other relatives, were killed by American forces. The Taliban wanted my brother and me to join them, to take revenge—not only for my family members, but also to fight the invaders and occupiers, because Afghanistan has a proud history of not welcoming invaders and occupiers. It’s a religious duty, a so-called holy war. And even at 10 or 11, I was certainly drawn to that. Being a Pashtun, being an Afghan, revenge was part of my lifestyle. We were between a hard place and a rock. The Americans wanted us to work for them, to do intelligence gathering, and the Taliban wanted us to become fighters and threatened us with all means, including death. Either way, our lives were in danger.

Q: Did you have any sense of where you were going when your journey began?

I had no idea. All I knew was that I was heading somewhere safe. I had heard I was heading to Europe. I knew my brother and I I were going together. We were in the hands of strangers. And I was actually quite ashamed. I felt that this was the most dishonourable thing to do, to leave my mum, to leave the women in need. So I felt great shame in leaving. That’s one of the things that people in the West don’t get. They think refugees have a choice. Well, you don’t. You’re desperate.

Q: Very early in your journey, you lost your brother.

My mother said not to let go of each other’s hands. But as soon as we got to the airport in Peshawar, we were separated. So not only was I trying to get to safety, I was also trying to find him. Even if I wanted to go back to Afghanistan, which I would have done when I was deported from Turkey to Iran, how was I going to go back and tell my mum I don’t know where he is? So I had to find him.

Q: You describe a vast people-smuggling network stretching across Eurasia. How does it work?

It is incredibly sophisticated. The human smugglers, traffickers and agents are more effective than some states and governments. I would be in one city, and before I knew it, I would be in another city, and everything would be organized. It was truly amazing. I had the main agent in Kabul. He had country representatives. So he had somebody in Tehran looking over his business, the commodities that we were, in Iran, and he would pass us on to somebody in Turkey. You are passed along from one place to the other. Responsibility moves on, but you are still linked to the Kabul guy. The treatment from some agents was heartless. They would lie to us. Sometimes, if they have to kill you, if they have to let you die, they’ll let you die. But the incentive for them is to keep their reputations for being good at taking people to safety.

Q: Tell me about crossing the sea from Turkey to Greece.

The Mediterranean was the hardest part of my journey. I was really afraid of the sea, because I had never seen it. I was in a small boat made for 20 people, and there were 120 of us in there for three days without food or water—and before that I had been in the forest waiting for the boat to arrive, also without food or water. We were told we would arrive in Greece a!er four hours. A!er 50 hours, the boat broke down. If the police had not arrived, we would have sunk in the middle of the Mediterranean. One of the biggest thoughts I had in my head was that my mother will never know if I am dead or alive. Nobody will ever find my body in the depths of the sea. I was afraid of death, but I was afraid of the unknown and what would happen to my mother and family. At least [with a body] they will know my grave is somewhere.

Q: How did you feel when you saw the photo of the little boy, Alan Kurdi, dead on a Turkish beach? That could have been you.

The sad reality is that happens every day. Children wash up on those shores every day. It’s nothing new. But that one picture, there was some sort of extra solidarity and extra support. Then, a!er a period, people forget.

Q: Eventually you made it to Calais, France, where migrants gather before trying to cross the English Channel to Britain.

Anyone who goes there with a human heart will not come back unchanged. People call it “the Jungle,” because it’s where a human doesn’t live. But refugees have nowhere else. For me, it was really boring. Time would not pass. I would be sleepless. I would be tired. I would be running from the police. I would be running from the lorry drivers. I would be running behind lorries on the motorway. It was really dangerous.

Q: With an agent’s help, you managed to smuggle yourself onto a transport truck hauling bananas and get to Britain.

I was taken to the immigration centre and was able to claim asylum. And for the next year or so, life became very hard. I went through hell. My age was disputed. My nationality was disputed, which was the biggest insult. There’s nothing worse than not being believed by the authorities and social services. I came to the conclusion that life was not worth living, even a!er going through all these things, even a!er finding my brother. I wanted to commit suicide. I was like, “What is the point of life if no one believes you? I crossed half the world for what? Am I not a human being?”

Q: How did you climb out of that hole?

I was very determined. I had a lot of help from friends, a lot of support from teachers. I continued to stay engaged and stay active. I tried to give back to society as soon as I had status and was able to stay here. I wanted to make a difference and help those who were less fortunate than me in their struggle.

Q: What do you say to those people in Europe and North America who are worried about the influx of refugees and what those refugees will do to their societies?

Firstly, I love the new Canadian Prime Minister and the way he has welcomed refugees. Canada’s reputation is changing in the world. I do understand why people are concerned, but my point is that people will not leave their families, their homes and their countries without extraordinary circumstances—they are fleeing wars and conflict, they are fleeing persecution. They should be welcomed. Refugees are people who will contribute to society. I can tell you that in the past five years or so, I have not wasted a day without giving back to society, because I have so much gratefulness to the British public and the British government for allowing me to stay here and have security and peace. We shouldn’t see refugees as a burden. We should see refugees as an investment. Those Syrians and Afghans who are educated—even those who are not educated— will do everything they can.

Q: You haven’t seen your mother since you left, but you talk to her on the phone. What’s that like?

I told her that I’ve written a book and that I’ve dedicated it to her, and she’s like, “Well, you have far too much time on your hands to write books.” It’s funny. At the same time, though, I talk about how she saved my life, but she lost me, too. I’m a completely different person. I feel like I’m a stranger. If I go back to my land, to my family, to my home, I wouldn’t really fit in.

Q: Have you thought about bringing her to Britain?

It’s a moral dilemma. The issue I have is: what about those families that can’t come to Europe? And I think my family is not more important than any other family. What if every refugee brings their mother and their family to the West? There will be nobody le!. Having them there is an incentive for me to go back and change things, to bring justice and freedom to my people and to ensure that nobody is forced to flee their homes.

Q: Do you regret leaving?

I wish I didn’t have to leave. I wish I didn’t have to write the book. I wish I didn’t have to go through what I went through.

Supporters of Iraqi Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr burn a effigy of a member of the Saudi ruling family as others hold posters of prominent Shiite cleric Nimr al-Nimr during a demonstration in the capital Baghdad on January 4, 2016, against Nimr’s execution by Saudi authorities. (Ahmad Al-Rubaye/AFP/Getty Images)

Why did Saudi Arabia execute Shia cleric Nimr al-Nimr—an action that has triggered an escalation in tensions between Saudi Arabia and its regional power rival, Iran, that has not been matched in decades?

One answer is: Why wouldn’t Saudi Arabia kill Nimr? The kingdom routinely beheads and shoots those it deems criminals or terrorists, with little regard for due process, and with an eclectic interpretation of the sorts of activities deserving of death. In 2011, a woman was beheaded for “sorcery,” and others have been executed for the same supposed crime. Nimr was only one of 47 killed on Saturday.

Considered a leader by some among Saudi Arabia’s Shia Muslim minority, especially those who took to the streets to protest the ruling House of Saud during the early days of the 2012 Arab Spring, Nimr was reportedly convicted of sedition, disobedience and bearing arms. He was a strong critic of the Saudi state but could not be personally linked to acts of violence.

Nimr’s execution was also part of a much larger conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran. The two countries see themselves as standard-bearers for, respectively, the Sunni and Shia strains of Islam, though their confrontation is as much about regional power politics as religion. And Saudi Arabia has been increasingly eager to flex its political muscle in the region.

Following Nimr’s execution, crowds attacked the Saudi embassy in Tehran. Saudi Arabia subsequently cut diplomatic relations with Iran, as did Saudi ally Bahrain and Sunni-majority Sudan. The United Arab Emirates “downgraded” diplomatic relations with Iran, and Kuwait has also announced it is recalling its ambassador from Tehran.

“Both Iran and Saudi Arabia are what we could call identity entrepreneurs,” says Matteo Legrenzi, a professor at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. “They do utilize sectarianism to shore up domestic and international support for their policies, but they are willing to cross sectarian lines. Political expediency always comes first.” Iran, for example, has backed Hamas, a Palestinian Sunni militant group that targets Israel. Saudi Arabia espouses an intolerant brand of Islam, but will tacitly co-operate with Israel, a Jewish-majority state, against their common foe, Iran.

Divisions between Sunni and Shia Muslims have existed almost since the dawn of Islam and arise from a dispute concerning who should lead the early Muslim community following the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632 CE. The struggle for regional clout between Saudi Arabia and Iran began heating up following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, which replaced a Sunni Arab minority dictatorship with rule by the country’s Shia majority, and a concomitant increase in Iranian influence there. The Shia, a minority within Islam, seemed ascendant. Sunni leaders began to fret about a rise in Shia power throughout the region. King Abdullah II of Jordan spoke about a “Shia crescent” arcing from Bahrain through Iran, Iraq and Syria to Lebanon.

From Saudi Arabia’s perspective, things have only gotten worse of late. Legrenzi points to three major developments that have made the country feel vulnerable, and therefore belligerent.

The first was what Riyadh perceived to be American President Barack Obama’s abandonment of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak during the Arab Spring protests in Egypt. Here was a longtime American ally whom Washington would not protect. What did that mean for the House of Saud’s security?

The second was America’s rapprochement with Iran, particularly the negotiations toward signing a nuclear deal. “The Saudi government thinks the United States is grossly underestimating the potential for upheaval that Iran represents in the region,” says Legrenzi. The Saudis “feel they are the ones who need to lead the resistance to this Iranian influence in the Middle East.”

Taken together, Saudi Arabia concluded America is no longer a country on which it can rely to protect its interests against Iran.

“They have more or less given up on the Obama administration,” says Kristian Ulrichsen, a fellow for the Middle East at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. “They feel there’s a sense of drift in [American] policy since the beginning of the Arab Spring, and it’s therefore incumbent on them and their allies, the other Gulf states, to take on the burden of trying to reorder a whole region that’s in chaos.”

A Bahraini woman holds a poster bearing a portrait of prominent Shiite Muslim cleric Nimr al-Nimr during a protest against his execution by Saudi authorities, in the village of Jidhafs, west of the capital Manama on January 3, 2016. Iraq’s top Shiite leaders condemned Saudi Arabia’s execution of Nimr, warning ahead of protests that the killing was an injustice that could have serious consequences. (Mohammed Al-Shaikh/AFP/Getty Images)

Nimr spent years in Iran, but there’s no evidence he was an Iranian agent or pawn. He was nevertheless a symbol of Shia defiance, and therefore of Iran. His execution, says Ulrichsen, was meant as a message to Tehran that, fairly or not, Saudi Arabia associates its rival with domestic dissidents and will take harsh measures against them.

A source Reuters describes as someone “familiar with the Saudi government’s thinking” told the news agency: “Enough is enough. Again and again Tehran has thumbed their nose at the West. They continue to sponsor terrorism and launch ballistic missiles, and no one is doing anything about it. Every time the Iranians do something, the U.S. backs off.”

It’s reasonable to presume that the source “familiar with the Saudi government’s thinking” is conveying a message from the Saudi government. It signals extraordinary anger with the United States, and also a willingness on the part of Saudi Arabia to pursue a more assertive foreign policy, especially concerning Iran. “The Saudis are signalling that the gloves are off, and they’re in no mood to compromise on what they see as red lines,” says Ulrichsen.

The repercussions of this escalation are unlikely to involve direct confrontation between Saudi Arabia and Iran, says Ulrichsen, adding: “Although in this super-charged atmosphere, anything can trigger something very quickly.” Already there are several proxy conflicts that will probably intensify. In Yemen, a civil war pits an Iran-backed rebel movement against the Yemeni government supported by a military coalition of several Sunni states led by Saudi Arabia. On Saturday, the same day that Saudi Arabia executed Nimr, the Saudi-led coalition announced the end of a repeatedly violated ceasefire that had begun in December to coincide with United Nations-sponsored peace talks in Geneva.

“This is going to make more distant the possibility of an accord on Yemen,” says Legrenzi. The war there, he says, will likely now continue longer than it might otherwise have done.

In Syria, Saudi Arabia and its allies back rebels fighting against Assad’s regime, which Iran supports with advisers from its Revolutionary Guard, and with its proxy Lebanese militia, Hezbollah. United Nations peace talks on Syria in which Iran and Saudi Arabia are expected to play prominent roles are planned for later this month. Their chances of success were low to begin with: Assad isn’t prepared to cede power, and most Syrian rebels aren’t prepared to let him stay. But international negotiations may be even more hopeless now that Saudi Arabia and Iran have reached a new level of bellicosity. “It was always an uphill struggle,” says Ulrichsen, speaking of the peace talks. “Now I think it’s almost impossible.”

America is in no position to try to dampen the regional conflagrations fuelled by Saudi Arabia and Iran’s growing rivalry. “There is this idea that the United States has not been able to bend the Middle East to its own desires for the last 20 years,” notes Legrenzi, and this has made Washington wary of entangling itself in conflicts there. President Obama in particular is reluctant to deepen American involvement in the region. He sees America’s long-term security concerns emanating from the Asia-Pacific rather than the Middle East.

Iran, of course, is happy to see American influence wane. Saudi Arabia would like Washington to be more engaged but doesn’t trust it to do so anymore. Both countries are trying to fill the perceived vacuum.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/why-would-saudi-arabia-execute-a-shia-cleric-its-all-about-america/feed/4How a prophecy can help us better understand Islamic Statehttp://www.macleans.ca/news/world/how-a-prophecy-can-help-us-better-understand-islamic-state/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/how-a-prophecy-can-help-us-better-understand-islamic-state/#commentsMon, 04 Jan 2016 22:07:29 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=817519William McCants on the apocalyptic End Times prophecies that drive Islamic State, why it’s so dangerous—and why it is so difficult to defeat

A fighter of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) holds an ISIL flag and a weapon on a street in the city of Mosul in June. (Reuters)

William McCants is a fellow in the Brookings Institution’s Center for Middle East Policy and a veteran scholar of Sunni jihadist groups. He has served in the U.S. State Department as a senior advisor for countering violent extremism and is the author of the recently published ISIS Apocalypse: The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of The Islamic State.

Q: Is the so-called Islamic State in fact a state?

A: Yeah, I would say so. It raises revenues from taxes. It monopolizes violence in the territory it controls. It provides public services. Something on the order of two to five million people live under its rule. I think by any measure it is a state, albeit a weak state. It is certainly more than an insurgent organization and vastly more than a terrorist group.

Q: Is it Islamic?

A: Well, they are certainly a Wahhabi state. They practice the kind of Islam that is found in Saudi Arabia. As to whether they are Islamic, that’s a question that’s best left to Muslims to answer. I would say as an outsider that it’s very clear the organization quotes from Islamic scripture to justify its political program. So it that sense, you could say they are Islamic. But they also ignore many parts of Islamic scripture that cut against their program, or explain it away. So in that sense, you could say they are un-Islamic. Ultimately, whether they are in the community of believers is for the believers themselves to decide.

Q: Why was it so important for Islamic State to declare itself as such?

A: Its religious vision is the return of the early Islamic empire, called the caliphate. And its belief is that the world is lost without this institution, because it needs to be in place in order to guide the Muslim community. They also see it as a fulfillment of prophecy. They believe that the caliphate will return before the End of Time and it will be ruled by five just caliphates before the world ends. The Islamic State sees the reestablishment of the caliphate as the beginning of the final countdown to the Day of Judgment. They have styled themselves as the fulfillment of that prophecy.

Q: How did Islamic State’s ideas about a new caliphate differ from those of its parent organization, and now rival, al-Qaeda?

A: All Sunni jihadist organizations are fighting for the return of the caliphate. They just differ over the timing. Most jihadist organizations believe that the caliphate is the last political institution that will appear. The Islamic State argues that you put the caliphate in place first, and then you go about conquering the rest of the Muslim majority countries, and finally the world.

Al-Qaeda argued that the jihadists weren’t ready to run the caliphate. They didn’t have the necessary skill or strength to establish one. They also worried that the United States and other powerful regional actors would move to crush it. So they argued that the jihadists had to get stronger and had to win over broad popular support for reestablishing the caliphate. And that’s another thesis that the Islamic State deeply disagreed with. Its argument was that you don’t need broad popular support for establishing the caliphate. You go ahead and build it, and then you go about winning popular support. Or, if it’s not forthcoming, you impose your will anyway.

A plume of smoke rises after an airstrike by the U.S.-led coalition against Islamic State group positions in an eastern neighborhood of Ramadi, Iraq (AP Photo)

Q: How does Islamic State’s current conflict with the West fit with the End Times narrative it espouses?

A: There’s a prophecy that says there’s a tiny village north of Aleppo in Syria where there will be an apocalyptic showdown between the armies of the Muslims and the armies of the infidels. So the Islamic State went out of its way to capture this tiny village [Dabiq]. Whether they captured the village in hopes that there would be an apocalyptic showdown there or whether they just wanted to use it as a recruitment tool is difficult to say from the outside. It’s tough to discern the Islamic State’s strategy based on prophesies alone, because the same prophesies also predict other kinds of events. For example, the same group of prophecies predicts there will be a truce between Rome—or the West, in jihadist parlance—and the Muslims. They pick and choose depending on the political circumstances.

Q: Does the importance they place on this prophesied apocalyptic showdown mean they want Western armies to attack them?

A: I think the right way to understand it is that they have their strategy, which is difficult to discern from the outside. But if that strategy results in an apocalyptic showdown, so be it, because prophecy required it. If it results in the West coming to terms with the Islamic State, so be it, because prophecy required it. Either way, things are gong to turn out as predicted in prophecy.

Q: What sort of legitimacy does Islamic State seek in Islamic history?

A: The greatest caliphate that ever ruled the world was established in the 8th century A.D. Islamic State deeply admires one of the rulers of this empire, a man by the name of Harun al-Rashid, who is famous in Arab folklore but also in Western folklore because he’s a central figure in 1001 Nights. But Harun governed in ways and did things that are anathema to Islamic State. He drank wine. He may have had male lovers. He allowed musical instruments in his court. He made truces with the Christian empires of the day.

They have to be aware of his behaviour and his brand of Islam that was so much against theirs. But they pick and choose from history is the same way that they pick and choose from Islamic scripture.

Q: What draws Islamic State’s recruits?

A: The locals, some of them just want to draw a pay cheque. They live in a war zone. There are not many jobs. Others feel compelled. The foreigners are more ideologically motivated. That’s not to say the foreigners are well versed in scripture. It’s just to say that their imaginations are fired by the project that the Islamic State is engaged in, which is the return of the caliphate.

Q: How much of the appeal is the violence and gore?

A: The violence is off-putting to most people, Muslim and non-Muslim. But it does have the benefit in Islamic State’s perception of attracting people who are in to that kind of violence. The Islamic State is waging a brutal insurgency. So burning the pilot alive or decapitating people—they want young men and women who are excited about these acts of violence to come and join their enterprise.

Q: How much of a boost did the apocalyptic narrative on which Islamic State feeds get from the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq?

A: It was the U.S. invasion the really spurred interest among general Sunnis in the End Times, because they could see there was a cataclysm in the region where prophecy said there would be a cataclysm. I don’t think it’s any accident that the group that has been the most apocalyptic in its thinking, Islamic State, was born out of that conflict.

Q: So how much blame does George W. Bush deserve for Islamic State’s rise?

A: I think he deserves much of the blame. He made the decision to invade Iraq in the first instance, but he also made the fateful decision to disband Saddam Hussein’s military and intelligence apparatus. And a number of those men ended up joining Islamic State. So I think Bush shoulders much of the blame for the creation of Islamic State because he created the circumstances in which it could thrive.

Q: And yet Islamic State was almost defeated in 2010 and then came back. How did that happen?

A: It was almost defeated because the United States had a major military presence on the ground. America worked with local Sunnis who were angry at the Islamic State and managed to destroy their insurgency and push it back under ground to become a terrorist organization. When the United States withdrew its troops from Iraq, that gave Islamic State more room to maneuver. And then the civil war in Syria gave them even more freedom of action. They benefited from the inattention of the Syrian government.

A: Yeah. He allowed jihadists to leave his jails in an effort to radicalize the revolution against him so he could present himself as a counter-terrorist. He also did not go after the Islamic State, hammer-and-tongs. That wasn’t necessarily because he had an alliance with them. I don’t think he did. It was merely because he had higher priorities—in other words, destroying the rebels that were coming after him in Damascus, rather than this group of people building a state in a piece of territory that wasn’t essential for the survival of Assad’s own state.

Two Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) F-18 Hornet jet fighters flying over the Romanian Military Airbase during a NATO reassurance measure in Campia Turzii, north-west of Bucharest, Romania. (Mircea Rosca/EPA/CP)

Q: How much of a threat does Islamic State pose to the region and to the West?

A: It poses the least threat to the U.S. homeland and to North America in general. We are lucky to have an ocean between us and this conflict. The Europeans have a far greater challenge, as we saw with the recent Paris attacks. The greatest threat that the Islamic State poses is to the Middle East and North Africa itself. It’s waging insurgencies in many countries. It has a war chest estimated to be in the two billion dollar range. It can do an awful lot of damage. And for a region that is in political meltdown, it can exacerbate many of the conflicts in the region and prolong their duration and poison their politics.

Q: Should the West be confronting it militarily?

A: Yes, because the inattention of the West is one of the major reasons why the organization was able to flourish and grow. The challenge, though, is that many of our regional allies are preoccupied with other things. And in reality, you would want them to take the lead in going after Islamic State.

Turkey is more worried about the Kurds establishing a state than it is about the Islamic State. Saudi Arabia is more worried about Iran than it is worried about the destruction of the Islamic State. Perhaps Jordan alone shares the West’s concern about the Islamic State and places its destruction as a top priority, but its resources are limited.

Given those constraints, I think the current strategy [or air strikes, training and the limited use of special forces] against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq is probably the best strategy.

Q: But the current strategy has been in effect for more than a year. Raqqa is still in Islamic State’s hands. Mosul is still in Islamic State’s hands.

A: This is one of those glass half full, half empty situations. The Islamic State has lost 25 per cent of its territory. Tens of thousands of its fighters have been killed. So there has been progress. The challenge is there is no capable partner to work with on the ground.

Q: What about deploying Western ground troops?

A: The downside of doing that is that it lets those local government off the hook from making the tough political deals they are going to have to make in order to sap the life out of the Islamic State’s support. Because if there is a large contingent of Western troops there, the local governments in Syria and Iraq would just free ride and not make the tough political decisions that they’re gong to have to make to end this conflict.

Q: You were in Ottawa in December and met with CSIS, Canada’s spy agency, and the Department of Global Affairs. What advice did you give them?

A: Islamic State is different in many ways from al-Qaeda in the way it recruits. It’s not trying to win over broad Muslim support. If anything, it’s trying to polarize Muslim opinion and recruit from that small minority that is attracted to Islamic State’s message. Much of my advice was to ditch any messaging campaigns that try to portray the Islamic State as too brutal, because the Islamic State is happy to be known as too brutal, and in many ways if we send those messages, we’re doing the recruitment work for them.

I think it’s best instead to release information that would be embarrassing to the Islamic State. If defectors are talking about how terrible it is in the Islamic State, that information should be made available. If governments are able to take satellite pictures of electricity usage in Islamic State that shows how poorly they’re governing, that they’re not able to keep the lights on, that’s also information that should be made available.

Many Islamic State supporters stop going to their local mosque at some point because they consider it too moderate for the fiery brand of Islam they have embraced. The only place you can see their activity is online. I think anybody in the West who is openly celebrating jihadist propaganda is a person of concern and should be watched—and, I hope, intervened with as well. I would like to see greater effort in trying to turn them around. Many of them are citizens of Western countries, and we want them to be productive citizens. So I think greater investment in intervention programs would be a good thing to do.

Yesterday’s battle in Iraq involving Canadian special operations soldiers and CF-18 warplanes was reportedly the largest combat engagement in which Canadians have been involved since their mission against the so-called Islamic State began more than a year ago.

It was not, however, the first. That Canadian soldiers have been exchanging fire with Islamic State fighters first emerged in January. The Liberals, then in opposition, criticized the governing Conservatives for what the Liberals described as deception.

In September 2014, then-prime minister Stephen Harper had characterized the mission of Canadian soldiers on the ground in Iraq as “advise and assist.” When news of the firefights broke this January, Justin Trudeau pounced.

“The prime minister made assurances to Canadians and to the House that, as we found out yesterday, were not exactly the truth,” Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau told reporters at the time. “The prime minister needs to come clean with Canadians on what’s going on and why he was lacking in forthrightness with Canadians.”

Trudeau kept up his attack later in the House: “The government said our ground forces would advise and assist, but not accompany Iraqi troops,” he said. “Now we find out they’re routinely on the front lines. Why did the government mislead Canadians?”

Other leading Liberals were equally critical at the time. “The government is going to argue obviously that this is not a combat mission in the sense of Canadian soldiers going on the offensive,” said Marc Garneau, then Liberal foreign affairs critic and now transport minister. “They are clearly on the lines, in some cases directing airstrikes, and this is something I think many Canadians did not realize. I think for some people yesterday that was a surprise.”

According to then-Liberal defence critic Joyce Murray: “It has the appearance of mission creep. There appears to be a change.”

Now, of course, the Liberals are in government. Anyone want to guess how Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan described the Canadian soldiers’ involvement in the multi-hour ground battle with Islamic State?

“[O]ur forces played a role in advising and assisting …” he said in a statement.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/then-and-now-trudeau-on-fighting-isis/feed/12Why Trudeau is lost on the Middle Easthttp://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/why-trudeau-is-lost-on-the-middle-east/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/why-trudeau-is-lost-on-the-middle-east/#commentsThu, 17 Dec 2015 16:56:31 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=812809The many ways the Prime Minister's position on the fight against ISIS is still shot through with contradictions

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has had almost two months since his election win to craft a sensible response to the question of why he’s withdrawing Canada’s CF-18s (and possibly other aircraft) from the combat mission against the so-called Islamic State. He hasn’t come up with one yet, and didn’t again Wednesday when asked by a member of the public at the Maclean’s Town Hall in Ottawa.

You almost want to sympathize with the guy, because his position—by its own logic—is shot through with contradictions.

Islamic State, he says, must be confronted, including militarily, and Canada must play a role in the fight against it. “The question that we have to ask ourselves, as a government and as a country,” he said during the Maclean’s Town Hall, “is how best can we help.”

Trudeau suggested that training local forces to take the fight to Islamic State is the answer. This is a skill, he said, that Canadian troops honed during 10 years in Afghanistan.

Fair enough, although training is hardly the only thing Canadians did over there. But there’s a strange implication here that Canada can’t do both: bomb Islamic State and train local forces. This, of course, is what Canada has been doing for more than a year. Trudeau added: “We know that Western armies engaged in combat is not necessarily the way to solve the challenges in the Middle East.”

This is a popular trope, but in this case it’s irrelevant. No one is suggesting Canada send an infantry battalion to the frontlines in Syria. The question Trudeau was asked is why he’s pulling out the fighter jets.

Maybe Trudeau also thinks airstrikes are ineffective. Evidence on the ground suggests otherwise. Islamic State has been stopped and in places pushed back as a result of coalition warplanes, including Canadian ones, coordinating their airstrikes with local forces on the ground.

But if this is what Trudeau thinks, let him say so clearly. Let him make the case that the air campaign isn’t working. It certainly has not been sufficient, but to argue that it’s not doing much good would require Trudeau to marshal evidence and rhetorical skills he has not yet deployed.

For that matter, if engaging in combat is not a productive way for Western nations to “solve the challenges in the Middle East,” as Trudeau says, why is he continuing with a “training” mission that involves Canadian soldiers calling in airstrikes and, on more than one occasion, shooting at Islamic State fighters on the frontlines?

It also appears that Trudeau will keep Canada’s refuelling and surveillance aircraft in the coalition.

This is noteworthy. During the election campaign, I asked Trudeau’s spokesman, Dan Lauzon, whether, if elected, Trudeau would withdraw those planes as well as the CF-18s.

“A Liberal government would transition away from all aspects of the combat air mission to re-focus our military role on training,” he responded by email.

This seemed to me to be leaving some wiggle room, so I wrote back:

“Thanks, Dan. I’m sorry for being redundant, but I want to be crystal clear. Would the surveillance and refuelling planes be withdrawn? I just want to be sure that your statement isn’t intended to be leaving grey areas in which those planes would continue to operate.”

Now, it’s possible Lauzon was being deceptive—not telling a bald-faced lie, a particularly brazen lawyer might argue, but engaging in deception all the same. If that’s the case, Trudeau should probably not make further claims about running an open and transparent government.

But let’s give Trudeau the benefit of the doubt and assume he did in fact intend to pull out the surveillance and refuelling planes, but will now keep them flying because he recognizes they’re doing good work.

The good work they’re doing is combat. Those planes aren’t dropping bombs. But how is finding targets and relaying that information to allied planes who then drop bombs on them any less combat-related than if Canadian pilots were to continue dropping the bombs themselves?

This is where the contradictions in Trudeau’s policy on fighting Islamic State really get messy—because despite panning a combat role for Western militaries in the Middle East, and despite plans to withdraw Canadian warplanes from the fight against Islamic State, he’s also admitted the coalition’s bombing mission is effective. Asked by the BBC last month to clarify that he’s not against bombing Islamic State, Trudeau replied: “Indeed.”

So now we’re left with a hodgepodge of statements and positions from Trudeau that don’t add up to a coherent policy:

– Bombing isn’t an effective way for Western nations to solve problems in the Middle East.

– I’m not against bombing Islamic State.

– We will transition from combat to training (even though Canada is clearly capable of doing both).

One final thing: In the Maclean’s Town Hall, Trudeau pointed out that U.S. President Barack Obama hasn’t asked him to keep the CF-18s flying.

Obama hasn’t asked, because he doesn’t want to embarrass Trudeau. The reciprocal courtesy is for Trudeau not to imply the absence of that request means Obama doesn’t want Canada to keep its CF-18s in the air over Iraq and Syria. He does—as do the leaders of Britain, France and other allied countries. If Trudeau isn’t careful, one of them might say so publicly.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/why-trudeau-is-lost-on-the-middle-east/feed/21A new website says ‘Click Here’ to house Syrian refugeeshttp://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/a-new-website-says-click-here-to-house-syrian-refugees/
Tue, 15 Dec 2015 19:05:11 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=811331A new online platform run by several Montreal tech entrepreneurs enlists Canadians to open up their homes to provide short-term housing to Syrian refugees

A small group of Montreal tech entrepreneurs is hoping to connect Canadians with spare rooms in their homes with Syrian refugees who need a short-term place to stay.

WeHost is an online platform that is enlisting Canadians to open up their homes to refugees for one to two months. As of Dec. 14, more than 470 Canadian households have signed up, according to the WeHost website.

Jenviev Azzolin, one of its co-founders, says hosts will be interviewed by WeHost volunteers or by “community ambassadors” in the city where the aspiring host family lives to try to ascertain whether the host individual or family is prepared for the job and to find a suitable match.

Azzolin says none of the WeHost founders have direct experience in refugee resettlement, but she says that several of those volunteering to be community ambassadors have backgrounds in social work, education and health care.

But according to Citizenship and Immigration Canada, short-term housing for refugees isn’t lacking.

“Plans are already in place for temporary accommodations for those who might need it. Our primary concern is finding permanent homes for these refugees,” says spokeswoman Nancy Caron.

Some government-assisted refugees may stay on military bases until long-term accommodation is found. Azzolin thinks housing those refugees with volunteer families instead would be a better option.

“We feel that it’s a much stronger integration to arrive in Canada and be living with a family,” she says.

Azzolin says she’s also been contacted by private refugee sponsors who say they need the temporary support WeHost is offering because they haven’t yet fully prepared a place for the refugees they are sponsoring to stay.

“People are telling us they’re resorting to their worst-case scenario: ‘We’ll move out of our family home so that they at least have a roof over their heads and we’ll go live with friends for two weeks. Or we’ll have to put them up in a hotel,’ ” she says.

She hopes housing some privately sponsored refugees with volunteer families for a month or two will mean the refugee sponsors won’t have to employ those sorts of expensive or inconvenient measures.

President Barack Obama works at his desk in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Monday, Jan. 27, 2014, ahead of Tuesday night’s State of the Union speech. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

In January 2007, with two years remaining in his presidency, George W. Bush addressed Americans on a “new way forward” in Iraq, which was then spiralling deeper and deeper into a sectarian civil war.

The so-called surge that Bush announced that night has been described as him “doubling down” on his Iraq strategy. That’s only true in the sense that, faced with loud calls to pull American troops out of the country to save American lives, he instead deployed more of them. And by ordering those troops to protect neighbourhoods rather than hunker down in large bases, he guaranteed more of them would die.

But Bush’s surge was also an admission that American strategy thus far was failing. Something needed to change.

Tonight, as President Barack Obama addresses the nation from the Oval Office on the subject of America’s fight against the so-called Islamic State, he finds himself treading similar ground as did his predecessor.

Like Bush before him, Obama must now know that his strategy in Iraq—and now also Syria—isn’t working. It has not been a total failure, and there have in fact been notable successes. American and allied intervention helped stop the total genocide of the Yazidi religious minority in Iraq, and stopped also Islamic State’s lightning advance through northern Iraq last year.

But Obama never defined his strategy as containing Islamic State. It was to degrade and ultimately destroy the group. Clearly, in this goal the coalition has failed. And it is a consequential failure: the whole raison d’être of Islamic State is to hold territory, to have an actual state.

Islamic State grew out of al-Qaeda, the terror group run by Osama bin Laden before his death at the hands of American special forces. One of the major points of difference between al-Qaeda and Islamic State during the insurgency in Iraq was bin Laden’s belief that declaring an Islamic state too early, before the jihadists could actually run a state, would expose the emptiness of their rhetoric. Islamic State leaders, on the other hand, never wanted to wait.

Their proto-state in Iraq collapsed as a result of the surge and because Iraqi Sunnis turned against it. But now, in Syria and Iraq, they are again trying to show the world that their Islamic State is a reality. Holding territory is vital to that project. But it’s also more than symbolism. Territory, and the revenue that comes with it through taxation and trade, facilitates more ambitious terrorism. It’s easier to plot attacks against Europe, against Russia, when you have a base to work from.

Raqqa: Islamic State’s de-facto capital. Mosul: the largest city in controls. These places must be taken from it.

Obama is right to insist that local forces must do the bulk of the fighting on the ground. But the world, led by America, must help. What we’ve done so far is insufficient. Tonight, Obama needs to articulate a new way forward.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/washington/what-to-expect-from-barack-obamas-oval-office-address-on-isis/feed/1This means (more) war in Syriahttp://www.macleans.ca/politics/worldpolitics/this-means-more-war-in-syria/
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/worldpolitics/this-means-more-war-in-syria/#commentsWed, 02 Dec 2015 12:35:03 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=803745Russia and NATO member Turkey are fighting a proxy battle in Syria, and it’s about to get worse

A Russian warplane goes down in Syria’s northwestern Turkmen town of Bayirbucak near Turkey’s border on November 24, 2015. (Fatih Akta/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

After Turkey downed a Russian bomber in November, saying it had violated Turkish airspace near the Syrian border, a charitable bakery that once fed thousands of internally displaced Syrians may have fallen victim to Moscow’s desire for revenge. The bakery, run by the Turkish humanitarian organization IHH, was destroyed in what the group claims was a Russian airstrike days after Turkish jets shot down the Russian plane.

IHH released video it says shows the destruction of the bakery in the town of Saraqeb in northwestern Syria. Staff had a chance to flee to safety after warning strikes reportedly hit nearby. Russia has not responded to accusations that it launched those strikes. But it has regularly bombed Turkey-backed rebels, including ethnic Turkmen militias in the northwest of the country, trying to topple Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, a Russian ally.

Russia intervened in Syria ostensibly to fight the so-called Islamic State, a jihadist group that has taken over large chunks of the country and of next-door Iraq, and that claimed responsibility for the bombing of a Russian passenger jet over Egypt in November, killing 224. A U.S.-led coalition that, for now, includes Canada has been bombing Islamic State for more than a year. But Russia operates outside that coalition and has focused much of its military efforts on other rebel groups that threaten Assad’s rule.

“The fundamental backstory is that the Turks and Russians have found themselves engaged in a proxy war in Syria,” says Asli Aydintasbas, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “They are supporting rival sides in a very bitter conflict. The Turks are digging in their heels to try to topple the Assad regime. And similarly, the Russians are digging in their heels to protect the Assad regime. I think this was unavoidable,” she adds, referring to Turkey shooting down the Russian plane.

Turkey and Russia have extensive economic ties, which meant both countries had an interest in avoiding this sort of direct confrontation. Previously, says Aydintasbas, Moscow and Ankara were able to “compartmentalize” their differences. They were at odds over Syria and—because Turkey is a member of NATO—over Russia’s barely disguised invasion of Ukraine, but maintained a functioning trade and tourism relationship.

The downing of the Russian plane—the first time a NATO member state has done so since the Korean War—upends this carefully managed arrangement. It may also have repercussions not only for the Syrian civil war, but also for the already fragile relations between NATO and Russia.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says he is “saddened” by the downing of the Russian plane but has refused to apologize. The plane was targeted after several Turkish warnings to Russia about its planes encroaching on Turkey’s airspace, says Sinan Ülgen, a visiting scholar at Carnegie Europe and a former Turkish diplomat. “That’s the reason why it happened. It was not the first violation,” he says.

Meanwhile, Russian planes flying over Syria will now be armed with air-to-air missiles. Moscow has also announced sanctions against Turkey that will affect imports from Turkey, charter flights between the two countries and Turkish companies working in Russia. Russian soccer clubs have also reportedly been banned from hiring Turkish players during the upcoming winter break.

But Aydintasbas says Russia will likely focus its retaliation in Syria. Russia has deployed sophisticated S-400 anti-air missiles there. This effectively nullifies any prospect of establishing a no-fly zone free of Syrian planes—something for which Turkey has long advocated. Aydintasbas suspects Russia will also intensify its air campaign against Turkey-backed rebels—and, it would appear, bakeries.

Another military response Russia may pursue would be to increase its support to the Syrian Kurdish PYD political party and its military wing, the YPG. The militia, which dominates much of northeastern Syria, is affiliated with the Kurdish PKK in Turkey, which the Turkish government (and, officially, many Western governments, including Canada) considers a terrorist group.

The PYD and YPG have taken large swaths of territory from Islamic State but have stopped their expansion westward at least in part because of Turkey’s opposition to it doing so. “Now part of the equation may be incentivizing the PYD to cross Turkey’s red lines, which have been made clear to them. That’s certainly a threat,” says Ülgen, referring to potential Russian means of punishing Turkey.

Open confrontation between Turkey and the YPG, which is co-operating with America in its air war against Islamic State, would complicate the campaign against Islamic State. But this clash between Turkey and Russia matters beyond Syria, too.

Ülgen says Russia’s alleged violation of Turkish airspace—which it denies—must be considered as part of a larger Russian strategy to probe and test NATO’s defences. “It’s very typical of Russian behaviour. It’s not unique. It’s exactly the type of behaviour we saw in the wake of the Ukraine crisis with their violation of Baltic airspace,” he says.

NATO responded to Russian provocations in the Baltics and elsewhere in Europe by increasing its military assets in the region. Member states look set to do the same for Turkey. At a NATO meeting in Brussels this month, Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion said member states need to support their Turkish ally. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, while also affirming Canada’s obligation to stand with Turkey, had previously said of the Russian jet downing that it would not be “helpful” of him to point fingers at one side or the other.

“The fear is that Russia will continue testing Turkish resolve and contesting the airspace near the Syrian border,” says Ülgen. While no one expects all-out war, the potential for clashes involving Russian and Turkish planes, as well as anti-aircraft missile batteries from NATO and its member states, persists. Already confronting an increasingly assertive Russia in Europe, NATO may soon find itself facing off against its former foe in the Middle East as well.

A Syrian Kurdish woman crosses the border between Syria and Turkey at the southeastern town of Suruc in Sanliurfa province on September 23, 2014. The UN refugee agency warned Tuesday that as many as 400,000 people may flee to Turkey from Syria’s Kurdish region to escape attacks by the Islamic State group. (BULENT KILIC/AFP/Getty Images)

Falah Mustafa Bakir, longtime foreign minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government in northern Iraq, has come away from meetings with top Canadian officials, including Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan, reassured that Canada’s commitment to confronting the Islamic State jihadist group will not diminish despite Ottawa’s pledge to withdraw CF-18s fighter jets from the air campaign against the group.

The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) is a semi-autonomous region in northern Iraq that has been at the forefront of the fight against Islamic State. Many Canadian airstrikes have targeted Islamic State positions opposite Kurdish lines. And Kurdish peshmerga soldiers have also been working closely with Canadian special forces trainers and advisers on the ground for more than a year.

“What we have been told is that Canada will not abandon the international coalition,” Bakir told Maclean’s during a visit to Canada this week.

“Yes, the decision has been made to reduce part of the air campaign, but Canada’s contribution to other parts, like providing training, capacity building, equipment or other types of military support will continue.”

Bakir says he has not yet been told exactly how Canada might increase its assistance to Iraqi and Iraqi Kurdish forces, but listed a number of areas in which his government needs help, including military hardware such as weapons, ammunition, bulletproof vests and night-vision goggles; medical training, including mobile battlefield clinics and ambulances; communications; and help dealing with mustard and chlorine gas attacks, which Islamic State has been accused of launching.

Bakir stressed the KRG’s gratitude for Canada’s help thus far and says he respects the Liberal government’s decision to end Canada’s participation in the air campaign against Islamic State, but he says airstrikes have been effective.

“The combination of airstrikes targeting ISIS targets and the peshmerga forces on the ground, that combination worked very well in pushing ISIS back and reclaiming territory,” he says.

“Yes, it’s true that you can’t defeat ISIS only from the air, but when you have reliable partners such as the peshmerga forces on the ground, it guarantees the success of any operation.”

As an example, Bakir cites the recent capture from Islamic State of the town of Sinjar, which Islamic State had held for more than a year after massacring hundreds of male members of the Yazidi religious minority and enslaving thousands of Yazidi women and girls. The town was liberated with few Kurdish casualties, he says, in part because of the close coordination between the international coalition launching airstrikes and Kurdish ground troops.

“We believe this is a shared responsibility. It is a common fight, and we are proud that our peshmerga are on the front line fighting this war. But we need our partners like Canada and the United States and other European countries who stand for values of freedom, democracy and rule of law in order to do it,” he says.

The KRG is sheltering nearly two million refugees and internally displaced people on its territory. Bakir says it has inadequate resources to care for them.

“We appreciate the decision that has been made to welcome certain number of Syrian refugees,” he says, a reference to Canada’s commitment to accept 25,000 Syrians over the next few months. “But we believe stabilization and solving their problems in the countries where they are would help a great deal.”

Bakir would also like Ottawa to open a consular office in the Iraqi Kurdish capital of Erbil. He says that would facilitate a strengthening of cultural and economic ties between Canada and the KRG.

“The people of Kurdistan are friendly and are faithful to their friends and to those who stand by them during times of difficulty and crisis,” he says, looking ahead to a time when, he hopes, relations between Canada and the KRG will be about more than military and humanitarian support.

4. Cleveland Cavaliers v Toronto Raptors

Patrick Patterson (#54) of the Toronto Raptors celebrates a basket during an NBA game against the Cleveland Cavaliers at the Air Canada Centre on Nov. 25, 2015 in Toronto. (Vaughn Ridley/Getty Images)

5. Christmas Poinsettia's Ready For Distribution

Employees at the Pentland Plants garden centre prepare Poinsettia plants ready to be dispatched for the Christmas season on Nov. 23, 2015 in Loanhead, Scotland. (Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)

6. APTOPIX Greece Migrants

An Iranian migrant has his mouth sewn shut during a protest near the village of Idomeni at the Greek-Macedonian border, on Nov. 26, 2015. (Giannis Papanikos/AP)

7. A man stops to look at a frozen handrail as he walks his dogs along the coastline, in Dalian

A man stops to look at a frozen handrail as he walks his dogs along the coastline in Dalian, Liaoning province, China, on Nov. 25, 2015. (Reuters)

8. U.S. President Barack Obama pardons the National Thanksgiving Turkey during the 68th annual presentation of the turkey in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington

U.S. President Barack Obama pardons the National Thanksgiving Turkey during the 68th annual presentation of the turkey in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, on Nov. 25, 2015. (Carlos Barria/Reuters)

13. 2015 American Music Awards - Show

14. APTOPIX India Sikh Festival

Sikhs light candles at the illuminated Gurudwara Bangla Sahib, a Sikh temple, to mark the birth anniversary of the first Sikh guru, Guru Nanak, in New Delhi, India, on Nov. 25, 2015. (Manish Swarup/AP)

15. Pope Francis

Pope Francis arrives to hold a Mass at the campus of the University of Nairobi, Kenya, on Nov. 26, 2015. (Ben Curtis/AP)

epaselect epa05039461 A still image made available on Nov. 24, 2015 from video footage shown by the HaberTurk TV Channel shows a burning trail as a plane comes down after being shot down near the Turkish-Syrian border, over north Syria, Nov. 24, 2015. (HABERTURK TV CHANNEL/EPA/CP)

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, at a press conference yesterday in London, was asked whether Russia’s involvement in Syria is helping or hindering the situation there.

Russia’s involvement in Syria, for those who may not be up to speed on the situation—and here we must presume to include those tasked with informing Trudeau what’s going on in the world—consists largely of bombing anyone in the country fighting to rid the place of dictator Bashar al-Assad, whose regime is responsible for most of the more than 200,000 deaths in that country’s civil war, and whose crimes include using poison gas against children.

Trudeau began his response, as is sometimes his wont, with a faint and partially suppressed chuckle, as if what he’s about to reveal should be obvious to right-thinking people: “Well, I think one of the most important things that we need to do is establish a level of coherence and cohesiveness even amongst very different actors to ensure that we are moving toward what all of us want, which is greater peace and stability in the region.”

How anyone other than a first-year student at a second-rate university trying to disguise the fact that he hasn’t done the class’s required reading gets away with saying something so utterly vacuous is a mystery one suspects will deepen as Trudeau’s premiership progresses.

But he wasn’t done. No one would say the “tensions” between Russia and Turkey are a positive development, Trudeau continued, referring by “tensions” to Turkey shooting down a Russian bomber it alleged had violated its airspace near the Syrian border. “But certainly it’s highlighting the desire by everyone involved to bring calm and to work toward an alignment that will allow us not to face concerning situations like this in the future.”

To recap: Turkey, a NATO member state, has just shot down a Russian warplane, something that hasn’t happened since the Korean War. It happened because Russia has repeatedly probed Turkey’s borders, as it has done from both air and sea to other NATO members, and Turkey finally had enough. These are not the actions of parties desiring calm and working toward an alignment.

In any case, for Russia and others involved in the conflict, including Canada, there’s no “alignment” to be had. Russia, under President Vladimir Putin, has gone to war on behalf of the mass-murderer Assad. On occasion, Russia has also bombed the Islamic State jihadist group, which claimed responsibility for the downing of a Russian passenger plane over Egypt this month, and which a U.S.-led coalition that for now includes Canada is also targeting.

But the possible outcomes of the Syrian civil war envisioned by Putin and by opponents of Assad such as Turkey and Canada are fundamentally different. There is no “coherence and cohesiveness,” however much Trudeau might wish it were so.

Trudeau was then asked if he agreed with American President Barack Obama, who after the attack said Turkey has a right to defend its territory, and with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, who said NATO members “stand in solidarity with Turkey.”

“I don’t think we’re entirely clear on everything that’s happened right now, and I certainly don’t think that it’s helpful to start off by me choosing to point fingers at one side or the other,” Trudeau said.

He added Canada “absolutely” supports its NATO partner Turkey. But the damage was done. Here was Trudeau seeming to forget that the “one side or the other” in this dispute includes Canada. When the head of NATO says the alliance stands in solidarity with Turkey, we’ve picked a side. Trudeau doesn’t get to stand above the fray and refuse to point fingers.

There’s a deeper issue at play here, relating to what Trudeau perceives to be Canada’s obligations to its allies.

Following the slaughter of 130 people in Paris this month—an atrocity for which Islamic State claimed responsibility—French President François Hollande said the country is at war. Trudeau responded as if nothing had changed. He had promised to end Canada’s participation in the combat mission against Islamic State before the Paris attacks, and he’s sticking to it.

France is a serious military power and can prosecute its war against Islamic State without Canada’s help (though American support is crucial). Canada is militarily much weaker. We depend on our allies.

Imagine if Ottawa were to suffer a terrorist attack by Islamic State on the scale of the Paris massacre. Imagine that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau were to then address the nation and pledge a “pitiless war” against the group, as did Hollande. What sense of duty, of solidarity, would France feel toward Canada then? How would Canadians feel if France promised only to send more trainers to Iraq?

Turkey is Canada’s ally, too. The cultural and historical ties are weaker than those with France, and Turkey’s government is drifting dangerously toward autocracy. But the NATO alliance kept the Soviet Union at bay during the Cold War because its members understood they were stronger united. Russia in recent years has once again been probing the alliance for weaknesses—launching cyberattacks here, invading countries that hope one day to join NATO there.

Russian incursions into Turkey’s airspace are part of that strategy. There should be no joy in the death of one of the downed Russians pilots, or of the Russian marine who perished in a brave rescue attempt. But the fact is Russia got what it deserved in Syria. Trudeau should have said as much.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/justin-trudeaus-vacuous-stance-on-syria/feed/41Who’s supporting whom? A map of Syria’s tangled coalitionshttp://www.macleans.ca/news/world/whos-supporting-whom-a-map-of-the-tangled-coalitions-in-syria/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/whos-supporting-whom-a-map-of-the-tangled-coalitions-in-syria/#commentsTue, 24 Nov 2015 22:50:09 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=800119Turkey's downing of a Russian bomber highlights the web of countries and armed groups allied together in various factions in Syria. We mapped it out.

]]>The Monday downing of a Russian bomber by Turkey, which says the plane had violated its airspace near Syria and ignored repeated warnings to change course, highlights the tangled web of countries and armed groups fighting and supporting each other in Syria.

The attack on the Russian plane by Turkey is the first direct military confrontation between Russia and a NATO member since the Cold War. And yet NATO members and Russia ostensibly share the same goal of defeating the so-called Islamic State jihadist group, which brought down a Russian passenger plane over the Sinai Peninsula this month, killing more than 200.

But any potential for cooperation between Russia and NATO members like Turkey, America and Canada is undermined by Russian support for Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, and Moscow’s habit of bombing opposition groups trying to topple him—some of whom are supported by America and allies such as Saudi Arabia. It’s complicated. To help you sort it all out, here’s a look at who’s supporting whom.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/whos-supporting-whom-a-map-of-the-tangled-coalitions-in-syria/feed/5Allies with benefits: The cost of a coalition with Russiahttp://www.macleans.ca/news/world/allies-with-benefits-the-cost-of-a-coalition-with-russia/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/allies-with-benefits-the-cost-of-a-coalition-with-russia/#commentsMon, 23 Nov 2015 12:05:25 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=797715If the West unites with Russia, it will help destroy Islamic State. But the long-term results may not be pretty.

Terrorism can forge strange alliances. Among the many repercussions stemming from the massacre of 130 people in Paris by the Islamic State jihadist group may be a thawing of relations between Russia and Western nations that have shunned it since Moscow annexed the Ukrainian region of Crimea last year and launched an unofficial invasion of eastern Ukraine.

French President François Hollande has called for Russia and America to join a “wide and single coalition” against Islamic State, noting the international community has been “divided and incoherent too long.” American President Barack Obama has said he would welcome military co-operation with Moscow, provided Russia is willing to focus its military efforts against Islamic State and not other rebel groups opposing Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.

The Russians appear more enthused. Ever since Russia began its military intervention in Syria earlier this year, President Vladimir Putin has called for a grand coalition against Islamic State. But much of Russia’s air campaign, especially in its early days, ignored Islamic State and instead hit rebel groups that more directly threaten the regime of Russia’s ally, Assad.

Russia, however, recently suffered an act of terrorism by Islamic State that was even deadlier than the attacks in Paris. The group has claimed responsibility for the downing of a Russian passenger plane over Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula in October, killing all 224 on board. Aleksei Pushkov, head of the Russian parliament’s foreign affairs committee, says Russia and the West share a common enemy and should put aside their differences to combat it. “We have had disagreements in the past, in the 1930s, but that didn’t stop us from creating a coalition against Hitler, and it was effective,” he says, according to the Russian news agency Interfax.

“It sounds very nice theoretically,” says Angela Stent, director of the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies at Georgetown University. The trouble, she says, lies in the different ideas Russia and the West have about Syria’s future. Most Western nations say Assad cannot continue to rule Syria, in part because his barbarism functions as an effective recruiting tool for Islamic State. Putin says the West’s refusal to engage with Assad has been “an enormous mistake.”

“Russia’s goal is to keep Assad in power—or, if there’s going to be a successor, to have a similar ruler so that they can maintain their influence,” says Stent. Russia has a naval base in Syria and has recently established a military presence at an airport in Latakia from where it conducts its air campaigns.

Jan Techau, director of Carnegie Europe, likens Assad to a “bingo chip” that Moscow will play when it suits them. “The Russians want to protect their strategic assets as long as they can. But once it becomes too costly, and when there is a political situation that pleases the Russians, they’ll let him go,” he says.

Civil defense members extinguish a military vehicle at a base controlled by rebel fighters from the Ahrar al-Sham Movement, that was targeted by what activists said were Russian airstrikes in the south of Idlib province, Syria October 1, 2015. (Khalil Ashawi/Reuters)

Russia’s initial intervention in Syria was designed to give it a say over the country’s future. If Putin crafts a co-operative military relationship with the West, that influence will increase. It’s a potential outcome that worries Syrians who want to see an end to Assad’s regime and believe any rehabilitation of it will only strengthen Islamic State. “Daesh and Assad are related,” says one Syrian in Paris, using an Arabic acronym for Islamic State. (She didn’t want her name published because she has family in Syria.) “Daesh exists because Assad exists, and Assad exists because Daesh exists.”

According to Techau, any military co-operation between the West and Russia in Syria would likely be temporary: “At some point the political goals that are quite different will become more visible again. But for the moment that co-operation, that tacit agreement, can still hold,” he says.

But Putin is looking beyond Syria. He sees partnership with the West in Syria as a way to make Russia seem an indispensable part of the global community—too important to be isolated and punished. “He would like the Europeans to forget about Ukraine and start lifting sanctions,” says Stent.

Ukraine’s deputy foreign minister, Vadym Prystaiko, a former ambassador to Canada, understands why Hollande is reaching out to Russia. “To his own people, he’s doing the right thing. He’s trying to find anything at his disposal to counter the threat,” he says. But Prystaiko says if Russia uses co-operation in Syria to normalize relations with the West, it may feel emboldened to repeat a Ukraine-style intervention elsewhere.

“If they are getting back in the game, who knows where they will send another rocket,” he says.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/allies-with-benefits-the-cost-of-a-coalition-with-russia/feed/22‘All of France is suffering’http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/paris-attacks-all-of-france-is-suffering/
Wed, 18 Nov 2015 17:48:58 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=795599Parisians are clinging to the ideals of fraternité and liberté. Still, on the streets, there are fears of dangerous divisions and more trouble to come.

If there is a spiritual heart of France, of the more permanent, enduring France, the France that has stood since the Revolution, it is here, in Paris’s Place de la République, with all its grandeur, bronze and Liberté, Égalité and Fraternité carved in stone.

This is where the French have long gathered to celebrate and protest, to show their unity and defiance—and also their irreverence. The monument at the centre of the square is often covered in graffiti, spray paint and taped-on political pamphlets.

Following last week’s massacre of 129 people, apparently carried out by the so-called Islamic State jihadist group, crowds again cover the square to mourn, lay flowers and sing La Marseillaise, state-of-emergency bans on large public gatherings be damned.

But the spiritual heart of Paris itself, at least in the sense of where that ephemeral and transient heart may at this moment beat the loudest, is, perhaps, a short walk away, deeper into the 10th and 11th arrondissements, neighbourhoods that are far from the Eiffel Tower or the Champs-Élysées and other sterile avenues of high-end shops radiating out from the Arc de Triomphe.

Here, the streets, while gentrifying, are more accessible to the capital’s energetic and multi-ethnic young people—“youth in all its diversity,” as French President François Hollande described the victims from some 19 countries who were murdered on Friday night, most in restaurants and a concert hall in these neighbourhoods.

“They attacked the people who are the most tolerant in Paris,” says Ronald Hatto, a senior lecturer at the Paris Institue of Political Studies, and maybe that, too, was intentional, a strike against the city’s vibrant plurality and the generation that will shape its future. Or maybe the attackers’ intent involved no symbolism, only a desire to kill anyone and everyone. As one Parisian man told his wife: “This is the first time it felt like it could have been us.”

It wasn’t France’s first terrorist attack, of course. As recently as January, jihadists targeted the Charlie Hebdo satirical news weekly and a kosher grocery, killing 16. But what happened last Friday was different, and not only because of the number of victims.

“Even though it’s not said like this, there was a feeling that, then, there were specific targets: journalists, freedom of expression and the Jews. This time, the targets could have been anyone,” says Karim, who works in France’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and asked that his real name not be used because of his position in the civil service. “It doesn’t mean that we are more concerned than before, but the feeling is different.”

Different, too, is the sense that, this time, there is no certain end to the horror. After the attacks in January, more than one million people filled la Place de la République. It was cathartic, says Karim. There’s been no similar rally this time. Any such demonstration would now be disallowed for security reasons; people also expect there will be more attacks. As many as two suspected perpetrators were still on the run as of Tuesday night, and police are searching for other possible accomplices.

Among the victims last week was Cécile Misse, who died along with her boyfriend and 87 others at the Bataclan concert hall when a trio of gunmen stormed the place, shooting randomly into the crowd, and then, for a long time afterward, at survivors who remained trapped in the hall, until police arrived and ended the siege by shooting one of the gunmen. The other two blew themselves up.

On Sunday, her friend Barthelemy Sanchez, a drama student, came to a flower-covered police barrier near the concert hall and remembered Misse for what he described as her kindness and sense of humour. “Yesterday I could not leave my house. Today was the first time I felt I could do something, to pay homage,” he says. “It was terrible, because it happened in our home,” he adds, referring to the attacks, “and we must care for each other because it is our home.”

Nearby, at a street corner where Le Petit Cambodge and Le Carillon restaurants face each other, crowds also gather where gunmen with assault rifles killed 15.

There is still a sign announcing happy hour on the outside wall of Le Carillon, and another advertising the bar’s mixed cheese and charcuterie plate. The windows are shattered by bullets. On of the bullet holes is stuffed with wilting flowers. Other bouquets are scattered on the ground.

“I am here because I live close by. I know these restaurants and I like this neighbourhood. I wanted to show solidarity with the victims,” says Isabelle Ferraty, close to tears. “But I think all of France is suffering, too.”

If France were to update its national motto with its origins in the French Revolution, solidarité might well be added to the existing liberté, égalité and fraternité.

The word comes up again and again among Parisians discussing the attacks and their repercussions. It has a deeper meaning than the amicable brotherhood of fraternité, implying a stronger sense of unity and obligations of mutual support.

Whether French solidarity will persist after so much blood has been spilled—in part by French nationals who reject the values of liberty, equality and fraternity, and instead kill on behalf of a foreign jihadist movement—is a question with which French people, and especially French Muslims, are grappling.

Some five million Muslims live in France. Many trace their origins to Algeria and other former French colonies.

While modern French identity is based on values rather than ethnicity or religion, in practice, many French Muslims live segregated lives and are often poorer than their non-Muslim counterparts. The suburbs surrounding Paris are full of bleak apartment blocks and have seen outburst of riots and car burnings by residents who complain of discrimination.

Some are also home to violent Islamists. Amedy Coulibaly, who, in January, killed a policewoman and four hostages at the Jewish market, grew up on a suburban housing estate outside Paris. Mohammed Merah, who, in 2011, killed seven people, including three children at a Jewish school, grew up on a similar estate in Toulouse.

Myriam Benraad, a research fellow at the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris, describes French Muslims travelling to Syria to join Islamic State as “the revenge of the ghettos in which we have left them forever.

“France is a disastrous society, let’s face it,” she continues. “Our society has not managed to manage its post-colonial fabric. Anybody who says black people or Arabs have the same opportunities as others in France, those people are lying.”

The right-wing National Front party, led by Marine Le Pen, has campaigned against what she describes as the “Islamization of French society.” She earned almost 18 per cent of the vote in the first round of France’s 2012 presidential election.

According to Steven Van Hauwaert, a post-doctoral fellow at the Université catholique de Louvain in Belgium, these attacks won’t necessarily result in an upsurge in support for the National Front, although he says mainstream parties, especially Hollande’s Socialist party, are vulnerable, and will become more so if further attacks demonstrate his government’s inability to protect French citizens.

Jan Techau, director of Carnegie Europe, thinks the National Front has an opportunity to gain ground, but says that chance depends more on economic factors than on any backlash against Muslims resulting from these attacks. “If France can’t modernize, can’t reform and create some sort of dynamism in the economy, I think we’ll see a further rise in populism,” he says.

On the streets of Paris, there is little sign of resentment among the French toward their Muslim co-citizens. Some anti-Muslim graffiti has appeared, but it is surrounded by a sea of chalked messages expressing multi-faith unity. “My belief is that we are strong enough not to be drawn into what [Islamic State] wants us to be drawn into, which is civil war within our communities,” says Karim, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs employee. “But if there is another attack, and another and anther, then it will be difficult to resist.”

Karim, whose family is from North Africa, grew up in what he describes as a difficult suburb. He was raised Muslim but is now an atheist. As a child of immigrants who now thrives in French society, Karim says he is exceptional, but says his example is becoming less and less rare.

On the Sunday two days after the attacks, Karim attended service at a local church. “It was good just to be with people in my neighbourhood, even for an atheist like me. It was really inspiring,” he says while drinking white wine and eating a plate of cured meat and cheese at a local tavern. Karim says the feeling was similar earlier when he lined up for two hours to donate blood. It comforted him to look around at others of different backgrounds and religions doing the same thing, and to imagine their blood mixing together to help other French people, regardless of what faith they practised or where they came from.

Karim is optimistic about the prospects of social harmony in France, in part because he sees integration happening everywhere at a grassroots level. His girlfriend’s father, he points out, might be inclined to support the National Front. But that is unlikely to last, he says, when the man’s daughter is in love with an Arab.

These attacks present France with an additional challenge, he says. Success for France depends on whether French people can hold true to France’s declared values. “We’ll win, not by saying we have a problem with a particular community, but by trying to be the republic we claim to be,” he says. “After these attacks, and others—and there will be others—will we be up to our ideal selves?

“The question is not if we’re going to survive, but are we going to survive by losing what constitutes us as a nation?”

There is one section of French society for whom these attacks resonate in a uniquely personal way.

France has granted refugee status to some 7,000 Syrians since the civil war in that country began in 2011—a conflict that has caused some four million Syrians to flee the country, running from both the regime of Bashar al-Assad and the depredations of Islamic State.

This summer, as hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrants from Syria and elsewhere streamed into Europe, France promised to accept 24,000 additional refugees over the next two years.

Most of the refugees entering Europe in recent months wanted to get to Germany. In a gesture meant to demonstrate its commitment to sharing the burden of settling those refugees, two months ago, France offered to give 1,000 Iraqis and Syrians fast-track asylum applications if they came to France.

Embarrassingly, France struggled to find takers. Only about 600 agreed to come. Some now live at a recreation complex north of Paris. For them, the attacks are disturbingly familiar. “I know these kinds of terrorists. It’s why we left,” says Ali Tarabien, a 37-year-old from Damascus.

Omar, a young man from Syria who does not want to give his last name, survived the journey to Germany, despite water flooding into the dinghy in which he crossed the Aegean Sea from Greece to Turkey, and despite having to run from police in Hungary. Today, around his neck he wears an Eiffel Tower pendant given to him by a French friend.

“I want to say to French people, ‘We loved you, just like we loved each other. And we hurt for Paris, just like we hurt about what is going on in our own countries. We are sad, just like you,’ ” he says.

More difficult in some ways than reliving the terror they thought they had escaped has been the worry that French people will turn on them out of fear that their numbers include terrorists like those who struck Paris.

These concerns were particularly acute in the days immediately after the attacks, when it emerged that a Syrian passport was found near the remains of one of the men who blew himself up outside the Stade de France soccer stadium. Someone carrying that passport, which is fake, registered as a refugee in Greece last month, and that man’s fingerprints reportedly match those taken from the remains of the bomber in Paris.

“I don’t believe it,” says Tarabien, his voice breaking. “How many years of war? Four years. And how many refugees in Germany? Have you heard of any incident? The French government knows it is not us. The problem is the French people. I hope they understand it is not us.”

Some French do see a link between an influx of refugees and the possibility of further attacks. “It’s easier for terrorists from Syria to come to France now,” says Daniel Gatin, 72, at the barricade near the Bataclan, where he’s come to lay flowers with his wife, Chantal. France’s pledge to accept another 24,000 refugees is a mistake, she says. “What will we do with them?”

As a refugee, but also a resident of France for the past 10 years, Mohamad Taha can perhaps straddle both worlds. In Syria, he was an archaeologist from Palmyra, site of breathtaking Roman-era ruins that Islamic State has recently taken to blowing up. Khaled al-Asaad, the 82-year-old antiquities scholar whom Islamic State beheaded and hung from a column in Palmyra this summer, was a colleague.

Taha was having dinner with a Syrian friend the night of the attacks and saw bodies on the street while trying to get home. He says that, at that moment, he imagined seeing all his friends and family who have died at the hands of the Syrian regime and Islamic State. He also imagined himself among the victims, recalling an incident in which he was badly beaten by Assad supporters in Paris four years ago. “It was like a film playing in front of my eyes. It was a horrible scene,” he says three days later, standing among other French men and women milling around la Place de la République.

Taha then tries to explain what he believes motivated the attackers. “The terrorists want to frighten us, and the best way to retaliate is to show that we are capable of overcoming fear and resisting with a love of life,” he says.

It is what Parisians have been doing since last week’s atrocities. They have stubbornly filled outdoor cafés despite the perceived risk. They’ve avoided scapegoating and divisions. They’ve shown a solidarity that is stronger than terror.

]]>‘Terrorism has no religion’: Michael Petrou from la Place de la Républiquehttp://www.macleans.ca/news/world/terrorism-has-no-religion-michael-petrou-from-place-de-la-republique/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/terrorism-has-no-religion-michael-petrou-from-place-de-la-republique/#commentsWed, 18 Nov 2015 01:38:24 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=795551At the hub of Paris's heartache, our foreign correspondent talks to Syrian activist Mohamed Taha, who was near the Bataclan when attackers stormed it

]]>Mohamed Taha—a Paris-based Syrian activist who has been railing against the Islamic State and Bashar al-Assad, and who was beaten for it in 2011—was having dinner near the Bataclan, the venue that was attacked on Friday. It was an assault right on the heart of Paris, on its diverse youth, that left at least 129 dead and at least 300 more wounded. In the video below, Maclean’s foreign correspondent Michael Petrou talks to Taha about what he saw as he shows us the supportive (and sometimes not-so-supportive) scrawlings at the Place de la Republique, which has become the beating heart of a city in mourning.

]]>Thirty kilometres away from Paris, a number of refugees from Iraq and Syria are staying at a temporary hostel. In conversation with Maclean’s foreign correspondent Michael Petrou, who visited them, they described the attacks in Paris as painful. It was, after all, the kind of attack they were trying to escape when they fled their homes.

]]>How about an ‘evidence-based’ Syria policy?http://www.macleans.ca/uncategorized/how-about-an-evidence-based-syria-policy/
http://www.macleans.ca/uncategorized/how-about-an-evidence-based-syria-policy/#commentsFri, 13 Nov 2015 20:49:12 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=793335There is proof air strikes against ISIS are effective. So why do the Liberals want to end the combat role in Syria?

Immediately after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s new government was sworn in earlier this month, Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development Navdeep Bains announced the re-introduction of the mandatory long-form census previously binned by the Conservatives.

“We’re focused on sound, evidence-based policy,” Bains said at the time.

Here’s some evidence that Trudeau and his new foreign affairs minister, Stéphane Dion, might not have noticed: Today, Iraqi Kurdish fighters, backed by Yezidi militias and fighters from the Turkish Kurdish PKK, liberated the Iraqi town of Sinjar from the so-called Islamic State—a murderous Islamist group that controls large chunks of Syria and Iraq.

Islamic State’s advance into the town and surrounding villages more than a year ago was what triggered military intervention against it by the United States and several of its allies, including Canada. American President Barack Obama said at the time he was acting to prevent a potential genocide.

Islamic State members consider the Yezidis, whose faith draws from a mix of ancient beliefs, pagans and devil worshippers, and slaughtered them by the thousands. Women and girls were enslaved and raped. Survivors fled.

Yesterday, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, an institution that knows a thing or two about genocide, issued a report concluding that one had, in fact, been committed against the Yezidis, and that it is ongoing because of the continued enslavement of the Yezidi women and girls.

Naomi Kikoler, lead author of the report and, full disclosure, a friend, said during the report’s presentation that when conducting research in northern Iraq, she was reminded of her grandfather’s family that was wiped out during the Holocaust. Never again, the world had pledged after those horrors. What’s happened to the Yezidis, she said, testifies to our failure to keep our word.

Genocide can’t be reversed, and the liberation of Sinjar won’t free Islamic State’s Yezidi captives. But it’s justice just the same. It’s a symbolic victory in a struggle that has already claimed the lives of at least two Canadians: Sgt. Andrew Doiron of the Special Operations Regiment, who died in a friendly-fire incident while advising Iraqi Kurds in March; and John Gallagher, a former Canadian soldier who volunteered to fight with the Syrian Kurdish YPG and died fighting Islamic State this month.

By severing the major supply route between Islamic State-held Raqqa in Syria and its Iraqi stronghold of Mosul, the capture of Sinjar is a strategic victory, also.

Which brings us back to Navdeep Bains and the Trudeau government’s declared dedication to evidence-based policy.

“Ten years ago, we learnt through the first Iraq war what happens when Western troops get involved in combat . . . It doesn’t necessarily lead to the kinds of outcomes people would responsibly like to see,” Trudeau told the CBC this summer, by way of justifying his plans to end Canada’s participation in the air war against Islamic State. The Conservative government, Trudeau continued, had failed “to demonstrate why the best mission for Canada is to participate in a bombing mission.”

It’s worth pausing to unpack Trudeau’s conception of combat, because the distinction between combat and non-combat is one Trudeau has often referenced. There’s a clear line between the two, he told Parliament this year. “It is much easier to cross that line than to cross back.”

Trudeau says he believes Canada should have a non-combat role in the fight against Islamic State—by which he means training. On the ground, however, Canadian soldiers at times conduct their “training” on or near the front lines. They’ve exchanged gunfire with Islamic State and called in air strikes against it. Trudeau has vowed to expand Canada’s training mission. But if he is genuinely opposed to a Canadian combat role against Islamic State, he’s gong to have to overhaul it, as well.

But let’s play along and pretend there is something qualitatively different between dropping bombs on Islamic State’s ethnic cleansers and child rapists, and targeting them from the ground so someone can do so. Let’s also pretend, as the Liberals do, that the surveillance and refuelling planes Canada has committed to the mission are more involved in combat than our special forces on the ground and, therefore, must be withdrawn, too. Let’s pretend, in other words, that Trudeau’s promise to end Canada’s air mission, while leaving soldiers on the ground, is consistent with his commitment to a non-combat role against Islamic State, and judge that commitment on its merits.

Trudeau said past evidence—the Iraq war and the combat mission in Libya (which the Liberal party backed unanimously)—demonstrates the often-negative consequences of Western military intervention. Whether the consequences of stopping Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi’s assault on Libyans, or overthrowing Iraqi mass murderer Saddam Hussein, were as uniformly negative as Trudeau seems to suggest is debatable.

But there is much more recent, relevant and compelling evidence staring Trudeau in the face—if he would only choose to acknowledge it. Sinjar has been liberated with the help of Western air strikes. Canadian pilots, not yet withdrawn from the war, took part—an accomplishment of which they should feel forever proud.

Like Kobani before it, and like many other formerly Islamic State-held towns and villages, Sinjar fell to a combination of local and Western combat forces.

It is no longer enough for Trudeau to claim that combat is not a particularly useful role for Canadians in Iraq and Syria, nor to argue that air strikes don’t necessarily lead to the kinds of outcomes we would want—because that is manifestly not the case. Air strikes are effective. Sinjar, the once-black heart of Islamic State’s genocide against the Yezidis, is free, in part, because of them.

And if Trudeau can’t claim that Canada dropping bombs on the génocidaires of Islamic State is ineffective, he must explain why it is wrong. That is a harder task. I want to believe that, deep down, Trudeau knows it is an impossible one.

He took a position to end Canada’s combat role against Islamic State before he was Prime Minister, when he didn’t have the political capital to spend that he does now. Those who supported him because of that promise will likely forgive him well before the next federal election, if he breaks it. But if he doesn’t, if he pulls Canada out of this fight, the moral stain—on his record and perhaps on his conscience—will persist long after he leaves office.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum today issued a report concluding that the so-called Islamic State committed genocide against the Yazidi people of Iraq, and that the genocide is ongoing.

Thousands of Yazidis were massacred when the Sunni Muslim extremist group overran northern Iraq last summer. Thousands more Yazidi women and girls were enslaved and are still in captivity. Tens of thousands were ethnically cleansed and are now living in displaced-persons camps in Iraq.

The report, which focuses on the experiences of ethnic and religious minorities in Iraq’s Ninewa province, says Islamic State also committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in its treatment of the Christian, Turkmen, Shabak, Sabaean-Mandaean and Kaka’i people of the region.

It says Islamic State’s violence against Shia Turkmen and Shia Shabak “raises concerns about the commission and risk of genocide,” but concludes that further investigation is needed.

The museum’s Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide undertook a research trip to northern Iraq this September, which informs the report. Naomi Kikoler, deputy director of the Simon Skjodt Center and the report’s lead author, says its conclusions impose moral obligations on countries such as Canada, which are parties to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. One of the pillars of the convention, which became effective in 1951, is that perpetrators of genocide must be held accountable and punished.

“There’s been virtually no effort to systematically document the crimes that have been perpetrated, to preserve evidence, to secure and preserve forensic evidence, to ensure that mass graves are being protected so we can actually have successful prosecutions in the future,” Kikoler says. “This is one area where Canada can play a crucial role in supporting financially, but also sending experts to areas that have been liberated from the Islamic State.

“Also, in keeping with the emphasis of [Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s] government on humanitarian assistance, there is a great deal more that can be done to help survivors of Islamic State crimes, most notably the women, children and men who have been kidnapped and have subsequently been freed or released by Islamic State. They need considerable help, when it comes to providing psycho-social support to help them return to their communities and live lives and rebuild their own well-being.”

Kikoler says governments that are confronting Islamic State as a terrorist group should also prioritize strategies that will provide ongoing protection to the minority communities that are its victims.

Today, Kurdish and Yazidi forces launched a military offensive to retake the Yazidi homeland of Sinjar from Islamic State. The campaign is supported by Western air strikes.

Canada has been part of the U.S.-led air campaign against Islamic State for more than a year, but Trudeau has promised to end Canada’s participation in it. He says Canada’s mission to train Iraqi Kurdish forces will continue.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/if-isis-is-perpetrating-genocide-is-canada-morally-obligated-to-fight/feed/7What happens when civil servants get partisanhttp://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/when-civil-servants-fail-to-appear-non-partisan/
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/when-civil-servants-fail-to-appear-non-partisan/#commentsWed, 11 Nov 2015 18:18:46 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=791681Non-partisanship is a principle of Canada’s public service. So when Ottawa civil servants cheered Trudeau’s arrival, they violated a basic principle of government

When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau showed up last Friday at the Lester B. Pearson building, home of Canada’s newly renamed Department of Global Affairs, he was treated to the kind of reception from employees there that Taylor Swift might have received, had she visited a local high school.

Civil servants cheered and crowded him for selﬁes. One woman complimented him on his clothes. “Dressed-down Friday—I love it,” she said (Trudeau was wearing jeans and no tie), before joining her colleagues applauding him.

Other ministers received a similar, if more subdued, welcome. Minister of Science Kirsty Duncan was hugged. When a reporter asked Foreign Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion a mildly critical question, surrounding civil servants groaned.

Former prime minister Stephen Harper’s relationship with the civil service was not always smooth. One Global Affairs employee told Maclean’s she hoped Trudeau’s visit might herald “an era of more open communication, and mostly respect.”

But the demonstrative adulation also worries some who feel Global Affairs employees failed to uphold their professional obligation to appear non-partisan. “I was taken aback by that event,” says Donald Savoie, a professor and expert on Canada’s public service at Université de Moncton. “I don’t think it was appropriate. If you’re non-partisan, then you don’t exhibit that kind of show. You don’t appear non-partisan by hissing at journalists for asking tough questions, or applauding, getting a bit giddy.”

Non-partisanship is one of the principles of Canada’s public service. The Public Service Employment Act recognizes the right of employees to take part in political activities “while maintaining the principle of political impartiality.” Public servants who hold Governor in Council appointments (such as the heads of federal agencies and Crown corporations) received an email at the beginning of the just-completed election campaign, reminding them of their duty to appear non-partisan.

Guidelines are subject to some interpretation. Public servants can attend all-candidates meetings, for example, but when Environment Canada scientist Tony Turner recorded and posted on YouTube an anti-Harper protest song earlier this year, he was suspended (with pay). “The general principle I would apply is, when you come face-to-face with the other party when they come into power, are you able to defend what you did? Can you explain what you did, and without being cagey about it?” says Philippe Lagassé, a professor of public and international affairs at the University of Ottawa.

According to Savoie, non-partisanship is “fundamental” to the way Canada’s public service works. “A new government that comes in has maximum energy and minimum knowledge. It’s important to have a public service that can speak to them without fear or favour,” and offer advice that is not shaped by political considerations, he says.

This sets Canada and other Westminster-style democracies apart from the United States, where much of the top tier of the civil service changes with every president, in an explicit acknowledgment that those individuals are not politically neutral.

Lagassé says Canada’s system—in addition to providing politicians with access to impartial, expert advice—ensures that the government will continue to function, regardless of whether Parliament is sitting, or if there is an election campaign in progress.

There are also constitutional elements involved. Civil servants are “recognized by the Supreme Court as being employees of the Crown, of Her Majesty,” says Lagassé, “and, therefore, their independence ultimately ﬂows from the fact that they are employees of and serve the Queen, as the formal executive, and not directly the government of the day, being the political executive,” says Lagassé.

That public servants serve the Queen rather than the Prime Minister may strike some as archaic and ridiculous, allows Lagassé, adding: “If you think that, then you don’t really understand what the underpinnings of it are, and it creates a disconnection in our understanding of what the public service is supposed to be doing.”

So how serious a breach was Friday’s lovefest? Savoie, who describes it as inappropriate, says it was also understandable. Civil servants likely felt “there was a great opening of windows and doors” with the election of a new government, he says. “They felt a certain degree of, ‘Let’s celebrate.’ ”

Still, Savoie hopes the display is not repeated. “I think there are some role models left in the public service who will say, ‘Hey guys and gals, let’s not do this again.’ ”

On Nov. 28, 1941, Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, sat down in Berlin for a meeting with Adolf Hitler. Their conversation, as described by University of Edinburgh historian David Motadel, who has written a book on Islam and the Nazis, was an “exchange of empty courtesies.”

According to the official German report of the meeting, Husseini told Hitler the Arabs and Germans shared the same enemies, namely the English, the Jews and Communists. He said the Arabs stood ready to help Hitler through acts of sabotage and the formation of an Arab legion. Husseini asked Hitler to make a public declaration that Germany supported Arab independence, as well as the elimination of the Jewish national home (in Palestine).

Hitler replied that he was committed to the destruction of the “Judeo-Communist empire” in Europe and would in due course bring that struggle to the Middle East, when he would tell the Arab world their hour of liberation had arrived. But he said he could not yet publicly declare support for Arab independence because doing so might intensify anti-German resistance among French opposed to the breakup of their Middle Eastern colonies.

The meeting ended. Husseini remained in Germany but never spoke with Hitler again. He requested a second meeting in 1943 and was rebuffed.

The mufti was a toadying anti-Semite, one of thousands who collaborated with the Nazis during the Second World War. His direct role in the Holocaust, which was already well under way when he met with Hitler, was minor—limited, says Motadel, to his efforts to block the emigration of Jews from Nazi Germany’s southeastern satellite states to Palestine.

This isn’t the way Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sees it. Last month, he portrayed Husseini as the Holocaust’s architect, the man who convinced Hitler to “burn” the Jews. “Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time; he wanted to expel the Jews,” Netanyahu said in a speech to the 37th Zionist Congress. “If you expel them, they’ll all come here,” he says Husseini told Hitler at their meeting in Berlin.

“So what should I do with them?” Hitler supposedly asked.

“Burn them,” Husseini replied, according to Netanyahu.

“Such a conversation never took place. It is invented,” Motadel said in an email interview with Maclean’s. Michael Marrus, a professor emeritus of Holocaust studies at the University of Toronto, said Netanyahu’s comments were “grossly inaccurate.” Christopher Browning, a professor emeritus of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, described them as “total fabrication . . . an outright lie.”

Netanyahu’s speech was all those things. Politicians distort all the time. But this was something different: the prime minister of a country that rose from the Holocaust’s ashes telling falsehoods about that tragedy for political ends. By doing so he has risked discrediting the government he leads, and eroding acceptance of the Holocaust’s established narrative. It’s an act that could reverberate beyond Israel to Europe, where the death camps and killing pits were located.

A visitor to Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust museum emerges from the exhibits and from the shadows that permeate much of the museum’s interior to a light-filled balcony that looks out over Jerusalem. The architecture is symbolic. Jews have lived in what is now Israel for thousands of years. The Holocaust, nevertheless, is central to many Israelis’ sense of national identity.

“There is a sense that the Holocaust is one important justification for why we need a Jewish state, so that we can defend ourselves. Never again should we be victims,” says Meir Litvak, a professor of Middle Eastern history at Tel Aviv University. The Holocaust’s resonance in the Israeli psyche makes it a powerful rhetorical tool for politicians. Many have used it.

Abba Eban, when foreign minister after Israel’s victorious 1967 Six Day War, said Israel’s borders prior to the conflict reminded Jews of Auschwitz, a Nazi death camp. Netanyahu himself, more than once, used the Holocaust as a comparison point for the threat he believes Iran poses to Israel.

“I think Netanyahu’s world view is that Israel and the Jews are facing a continuous, unbroken threat to their existence. Basically, we are facing a new Hitler every generation. It was the Nazis, then the mufti, [former Egyptian president Gamal] Abdel Nasser, the Iranians, the Palestinians, etc.,” says Litvak.

Netanyahu’s most recent evocation of the Holocaust—made as Israel is gripped by a wave of stabbing attacks against Jews by Palestinians—may have been motivated by a desire to demonize the Palestinians by demonstrating that they wanted to kill Jews before the creation of the modern state of Israel, and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967. “Basically, the Palestinians and the Nazis are one and the same, and it’s all part of a long continuum,” says Browning, referring to the argument he says Netanyahu is making.

“That’s why [Netanyahu believes] you can’t talk to these people [Palestinians]. You can’t negotiate with them. And you can’t sympathize with them. And you certainly can’t consider them victims, because the Holocaust is the ultimate victimization of Jews,” adds Browning. “Netanyahu is trying to play the Holocaust card to basically instrumentalize the Holocaust to deny any kind of recognition of whatever rights and grievances the Palestinians themselves might have.”

According to Litvak, Israelis are still traumatized by the Holocaust. “And I’m not saying it’s never used as a political weapon. It’s used everywhere. The question is how much do you distort?” he says.

Distortions and lies about the Holocaust are rife in Arab and Muslim countries. Former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad famously described the murder of some six million Jews a “myth” and a “lie.” “There’s no education about the Holocaust, really, in the Arab world,” says Mehnaz Afridi, an assistant professor of religious studies at Manhattan College in New York.

Even where ignorance about the Holocaust is deeply rooted, falsehoods and denials about it also often serve political purposes. “Because if the world supported the Jews because of the Holocaust, and if you can prove there was no Holocaust, then Israel will lose its support,” says Litvak, co-author with Esther Webman of From Empathy to Denial: Arab Responses to the Holocaust.

Lies about the Holocaust might be expected from Israel’s worst enemies. But Holocaust falsehoods from Israel’s prime minister have their own damaging repercussions. “If Netanyahu is caught in a serious distortion, then his credibility as a leader, as a spokesman for Israel, is shaken seriously,” says Litvak. “I can imagine now anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers in the West who will take the first half of Netanyahu’s sentence—‘Hitler did not want to exterminate the Jews’—and they will use it. He undermined the credibility of any Israeli leader.”

More than a week after making his initial remarks, Netanyahu said he wished to “clarify” them, and said it was the Nazis who decided to embark on a campaign to exterminate Europe’s Jews. But the damage might not be easily reversible. Netanyahu gave an air of credibility to “fringe discourses” that conflate and link Islam and Nazism, says Stefan Ihrig, a historian at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute.

Browning, who has testified as an expert witness at two Holocaust-denial trials, fears what might happen if he is called to do so again.“I know exactly what’s going to be thrown in my face,” he says. “ ‘Why can’t my [client] do it if the prime minister of Israel does it? Why is my guy being charged, and [Netanyahu] is elected prime minister of Israel?’ For someone who’s supposed to have the interests of the state of Israel at heart, this is extraordinarily self-destructive.”

There are potential repercussions beyond Israel as well. “Part and parcel of Holocaust denial is this motivation to deflect guilt away from Germany, and this is where Netanyahu has found strange partners in his rhetoric,” says Ihrig.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel quickly and unequivocally reiterated Germany’s responsibility for the Holocaust following Netanyahu’s comments. But Europeans have not always readily acknowledged their historic role in the Holocaust. When they do, it can shape debates about current events—including the influx of refugees, many of whom are Arabs, into Europe.

“The Holocaust has become an event that allows Europeans to be critical of the present by considering the past. If the blame for the Holocaust can be directed away from Europeans toward others, then that capacity for self-criticism could weaken,” writes Timothy Snyder, author of Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, in a recent essay for CNN.

“As Arab refugees arrive in Europe, the crucial framing question is: Who is the victim here? When Europeans consider the history of the 1930s and 1940s, when Jews were forced to leave their homes and often found no shelter anywhere in Europe, they can see the Arabs as the victims. But if Europeans follow Netanyahu’s short circuit and blame the Holocaust on Arabs, then Europeans can see themselves as the victims.”

In the introduction to Black Earth, Snyder says the history of the Holocaust is not over. “Its precedent is eternal, and its lessons have not yet been learned,” he writes.

What those lessons are is open to debate—by historians, politicians and others. New ones will undoubtedly emerge with the passage of time. All of them depend on historical truth. All of us, but perhaps especially the prime minister of Israel, have an obligation to protect that.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/worldpolitics/why-netanyahus-revisionist-holocaust-history-helps-no-one/feed/3The end of China’s one-child failurehttp://www.macleans.ca/news/world/the-end-of-chinas-one-child-failure/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/the-end-of-chinas-one-child-failure/#commentsThu, 29 Oct 2015 21:12:05 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=782447The policy to stop out of control population growth changed social and family norms in dangerous, tragic ways

Li Yan (L), pregnant with her second child, lies on a bed as her daughter places her head on her mother’s stomach in Hefei, Anhui province February 20, 2014. Li gave birth to a baby boy on February 23, 2014 after Li’s family became the first to receive a birth permit to have a second child in the province earlier this month. (China Daily China Daily/Reuters)

China’s announcement Thursday that it will ease the one-child policy that has imposed state control over the fertility choices of hundreds of millions of women for more than three decades is a partial acknowledgment of what a colossal disaster it has been.

Now, instead of being limited to having one child, most Chinese families will be allowed two.

The one-child policy was introduced in the late 1970s because of fears that the country’s population—already the largest in the world—was growing out of control.

There have always been Chinese who were allowed to have more than one child—ethnic minorities, for example—and the number of exceptions to the policy have grown of late. But for others, the one-child policy has been rigidly and harshly enforced. Pregnant women have been forced to have abortions, including in the third trimester, or have felt pressure to end their pregnancies out of fear that they or their husbands would lose their jobs if they did not.

Because many Chinese families want a male heir, girls are more likely to be aborted or even killed after birth. “There’s a kind of unspoken but widely known [trend],” says Joshua Fogel, a historian at York University. “There’s all kinds of female infanticide that’s been going on for decades. So what’s happened is there’s this huge population imbalance now. And that doesn’t bode well for the future.”

Millions of Chinese men can’t find wives and start families simply because there are fewer women than men.

The policy also changed social norms surrounding the family, says Fogel. “You could actually see this walking around China in the ’80s and ’90s,” he says. “Since people knew they were not going to have six or eight children in their family, like perhaps their grandparents had, once you had that one child—and for most people preferably a male child—and now that people had more money, they doted on that child. They called them ‘little emperors.’ These little boys, they’d be dressed up literally like little emperors. And they were often overweight, because people now had more calories in their diet and were foisting it on their youngest one. So it had some serious cultural impacts as well.”

It was the economic impacts of the one-child policy, though, that likely caused China’s ruling Communist party to relax its efforts at population control.

When China’s economy was more strictly controlled and rural, the one-child policy was not so damaging, says Fogel. Chinese were assigned jobs, and everyone was taken care of—“with the exception of government leaders, at a fairly low level.”

But as China has urbanized, its economy has become more capitalistic. It depends on increasing numbers of young people entering the workforce. China’s aging population will also need people to care for it, and this too requires more children.

This is a policy amendment, not a change. Instead of a one-child policy, China will now have a two-child one. State control has not been lessened, even if what’s allowed has expanded.

The impact of the change will likely not be felt for at least two decades, when children born after the change begin working and starting families of their own. If they’re lucky, by then China will have jettisoned completely the idea that it has the right to control the wombs of Chinese citizens, and the fates of their unborn children.

US soldiers of the Combined Team Nangarhar of the CT Bastogne, 1st Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) of the United States take a break after an award ceremony at Forward Operating Base, Finley Shields in Jalalabad in Nangarhar province on April 6, 2013. (Manjunath Kiran/AFP/Getty Images)

American President Barack Obama will not end his country’s wars in the Middle East after all.

Obama campaigned for the presidency on a pledge to end America’s conflict in Iraq, and, shortly after his election, promised to pull all American troops from that country by the end of 2011. He brought the troops home as promised, but more than 3,000 are now back, helping to battle an insurgency by the so-called Islamic State jihadist group.

During his 2012 re-election campaign, Obama said he would “end the war in Afghanistan in 2014.” American and NATO troops duly held a ceremony that December to mark the transition in their role from combat to support and training. Some 9,800 American troops still remained in the country, but Obama had pledged in May 2014 to halve that by the end of this year, and said that by the end of 2016, “our military will draw down to a normal embassy presence in Kabul.”

Last week, citing an enduring American commitment to the country, he said the 9,800 U.S. troops still there would stay through most of next year. Some 5,500 will remain when Obama exits the White House in January 2017, dispersed at bases throughout the country.

Obama had often framed his time in office as the antithesis to that of his predecessor, George W. Bush, who began America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Obama wanted to avoid entangling America in new open-ended wars, and tried to “responsibly end” the ones it was already fighting. “The tide of war is receding,” the President liked to say when publicly discussing American military withdrawals.

It was an unfortunate metaphor, propelled more by wishful thinking than dispassionate observation when Obama repeated the phrase on at least three separate occasions in 2011. Besides, as anyone who has watched an ocean for more than 12 hours knows, receding tides come back.

Such was the case in Iraq. Islamic State, an outgrowth of al-Qaeda in Iraq, stormed through the country in June 2014 and now controls large chunks of Iraq and next-door Syria. America’s absence from that war lasted less than three years.

In Afghanistan, more than 5,000 Afghan troops died this year fighting the Taliban and other insurgent groups. While Afghan government troops hold most major population centres, the Taliban is strong in rural areas.

Weeks ago, those insurgents briefly took a provincial capital, Kunduz. American special forces troops who were reportedly advising Afghan soldiers exchanged fire with Taliban fighters. America also launched supportive air strikes, several of which hit a hospital run by the international charity Doctors Without Borders, killing at least 22 people, including staff and patients. Obama apologized for the attack.

Kunduz was quickly retaken, but the Taliban assault demonstrated their persistent strength. Sources inside the city reached by Maclean’s said it was ripe for the taking. For years, Kunduz, like much of Afghanistan, has suffered from a corrupt police force and local militias driven more by financial considerations and ethnic alliances than loyalties to the state.

(AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

Obama’s rhetoric about America’s drawdown was looking more and more disconnected from reality. Gen. John Campbell, the top commander of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, said as much to a Senate committee earlier this month: “Based on conditions on the ground, I do believe we have to provide our senior leadership options different than the current plan we are going with,” he said.

The President says the nature of the American mission in Afghanistan will not change. The troops that stay will be involved in training Afghan forces and counterterrorism (though the latter definition leaves room for interpretation, as U.S. actions in Kunduz demonstrated).

The announced extension, however, is significant—for Obama’s presidency and for Afghanistan itself. Obama inherited two wars. One, in Iraq, he never believed America should have launched in the first place. Afghanistan was the conflict he used to call the “good war,” the one America had to fight.

His belligerence, however, was always mitigated by an aversion to long military engagements. When he ordered 30,000 American troops to “surge” into Afghanistan in 2009, he also set a date to begin pulling them back, 18 months later. He wanted to end America’s “good war” in Afghanistan as badly as he wanted to end the bad one in Iraq. Instead, he’ll bequeath both conflicts to his successor.

For a President who pointedly called Afghanistan America’s “longest war,” as he plotted its end barely a year ago, prolonging that war must have been an uncomfortable choice to make. But, however much Obama might have wanted to extract America from the war in Afghanistan—however attainable that goal might have seemed to him when he promised to meet it—America still has unfinished business there.

“Maintaining American troops in Afghanistan can in no way slow down the rapid progress of our jihad and struggle,” the Taliban said in a written statement issued last Friday.

The Taliban’s progress of late is indeed one of the factors that motivated Obama’s decision, but it’s not the only one, says James Dobbins, who served as Obama’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan from 2013 to 2014, and, prior to that, was America’s representative to the Afghan opposition under George W. Bush.

“You have to go back to when he last made his decision, then look at the things that have happened since,” says Dobbins, referring to Obama’s May 2014 speech in which he set a timetable to bring all but embassy-bound soldiers home by the end of 2016. “Two weeks later, the Iraqi army collapsed, and Islamic State seized a large portion of Iraq,” he notes, an event that demonstrated how quickly what America built up in a fragile foreign state could unravel.

U.S. President Barack Obama listens as Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani speaks during a joint press conference at the White House in Washington, DC, March 24, 2015. (Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images)

Afghanistan’s post-9/11 president, Hamid Karzai, was then replaced by former World Bank executive Ashraf Ghani. The new government, says Dobbins, now a senior fellow at the Rand Corporation, was “considerably more co-operative, more friendly, more grateful,” and it “specifically asked for the United States to sustain its commitment beyond 2016.”

Other factors included Islamic State making inroads in Afghanistan, and the breakdown of peace talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government after it emerged this summer that the Taliban’s leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, had in fact died two years earlier, reportedly in a Pakistani hospital. Both developments underlined Afghanistan’s vulnerability—as did the temporary fall of Kunduz.

According to Dobbins, the risks of deepening instability in Afghanistan justify America’s continued intervention there. Total state failure in Afghanistan is unlikely to be contained, he says. “It could become a black hole in which dozens of extremist movements—Uzbek, Tajik, Pashtun, Arab—could operate against the stability of those counties, including Pakistan, which is a nuclear-armed power.”

The troop extension, Dobbins says, is not a particularly burdensome investment. There are more American troops currently deployed in South Korea, he notes. And he says the gains Afghanistan has made since 9/11 are worth protecting. “It’s made startling advances in terms of longevity, in terms of literacy and in terms of the role of women,” he says. “That would be rolled back pretty quickly if we abandoned it at this stage.”

Ali Mohammad Ali, a political and security analyst in Kabul, says the troop extension will not be enough to help Afghanistan defeat the Taliban. Far more foreign troops were in the country before now, and insurgent groups could not be stamped out. But Ali says the extension will likely allow Afghan forces to hold the ground they have now. He says it will also provide a psychological boost to the Afghan government and security forces to know they continue to enjoy American support. And he believes the extension will result in pressure on Pakistan, a country he says has an “agenda of controlling Afghanistan,” to end its support for the Taliban.

Support and shelter for the Afghan Taliban by Pakistan’s military and its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy agency is well-established. But Obama, in his speech announcing the troop extension, made only passing and somewhat oblique reference to it. “Sanctuaries for the Taliban and other terrorists must end,” he said, before noting he would be hosting Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif the following week. “And I will continue to urge all parties in the region to press the Taliban to return to peace talks and to do their part in pursuit of the peace that Afghans deserve,” he said.

According to Aimal Faizi, an Afghan journalist who was a spokesperson for Karzai during his presidency, America’s reluctance to directly confront “outside” state support for the Taliban and other insurgent groups means no amount of U.S. troops in the country will benefit Afghanistan’s peace and security.

“We should not continue fooling ourselves that the Taliban and other violent groups are soldiers of Islam, or they are genuinely fighting the infidels for the cause of Islam,” he said in an email interview. “It is a fake political mask on a group of individuals who are being used by states or state-created and -supported structures against Afghanistan for political ends and raison d’État. Therefore, without addressing the sources of motivation for the terrorist groups, any strategy to eliminate them militarily . . . will be of no effect.”

Afghanistan’s security forces take their position during a clash by Taliban fighters in the highway between Balkh province to Kunduz city, north of Kabul, Afghanistan. (AP Photo, File)

Exactly how America should address Pakistan’s relationship with the Taliban has confounded American policy-makers since 9/11. Thomas Ruttig, co-director of the Afghanistan Analysts Network in Kabul, says the Taliban are “not marionettes” of Pakistan. “They’re also players in their own right, and that needs to be accepted,” he says.

The relationship is nevertheless extremely close. Pakistan’s defence strategy is built on the idea of having “strategic depth,” to its west, and that means a compliant government in Afghanistan. The Taliban fit the bill. And if they’re not going to run things from Kabul, they can destabilize any government that tries.

Dobbins believes the most effective approach is to target Pakistan’s military, which receives billions of dollars worth of American military assistance, rather than its civilian government, which has limited control over its military and the ISI. “Our military assistance and our military collaboration with Pakistan should be conditional on more effective behaviour against the Afghan Taliban and associated groups.”

Christine Fair, an associate professor of peace and security studies at Georgetown University, says America should be more coercive. “There is an unwillingness to treat Pakistan like an enemy,” she says. This is because America fears Pakistan’s nuclear weapons might fall into the hands of terrorists if the state is weakened, and because it believes Pakistan might stop co-operating against al-Qaeda and other transnational anti-American terrorist groups if Washington cuts its military assistance.

Fair supports the American troop extension, but she cautions it won’t be sufficient on its own to ensure Afghanistan’s long-term stability. Pakistan’s support for Afghan insurgent groups is one problem. Another is the size of the Afghan state, including its security forces, which she says are too big and expensive to sustain themselves. “But it’s very difficult to downsize security forces when you’re fighting an insurgency, because anyone that you downsize, they go to the insurgents,” she says.

Fair says Afghanistan’s future depends on its economic viability: generating enough revenue to pay for its own soldiers and police. Eventually, and inevitably, she says, America will stop footing the bill.

This requires the Afghan government to reduce corruption and graft, to fairly and effectively tax its citizens, and to monetize some of Afghanistan’s natural resources. Its ability to exploit that buried wealth is frustrated by a shortage of skilled workers, and a lack of dependable electricity and transportation infrastructure.

The American troop extension doesn’t remedy any of these deeper problems—not Pakistan’s interference, and not the discrepancy between the size of Afghanistan’s security forces and what it can afford to pay for. America has bought Afghanistan a bit more time. It was probably a necessary step, but it’s a modest one. Afghanistan will have to tackle its more fundamental problems on its own. That’s a challenge that may outlast Obama’s successor, as well.

]]>Dear Mr. Trudeau, about Syria . . .http://www.macleans.ca/uncategorized/dear-mr-trudeau-about-syria/
http://www.macleans.ca/uncategorized/dear-mr-trudeau-about-syria/#commentsWed, 21 Oct 2015 19:56:45 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=774205Your party pioneered the notion of 'responsibility to protect'. Ending the air war against Islamic State would violate it.

Telling a politician he should break a promise is generally a hard case to make. But hear me out.

You have pledged to end Canada’s involvement in an air war against the so-called Islamic State, a band of genocidal thugs, slavers and rapists who have taken over large parts of Iraq and Syria.

A couple of days after you voted against a motion to support Canadian air strikes on the group last October, I was in Iraq, where every single person I asked—Iraqis, and also Syrian refugees sheltering there—said they wanted Canada to bomb Islamic State.

You, as far as I know, have never been to Iraq. Hearing first-hand about the cruelty, sexual violence and mass murder unleashed by Islamic State might have caused you to think differently about combating them.

(Or perhaps not. Last year, Marc Garneau, then your foreign affairs critic, made a very brief visit to the country with then-foreign affairs minister John Baird and then-NDP foreign affairs critic Paul Dewar, and returned thinking Canada dropping bombs on Islamic State throat-slitters was “overkill.”)

Your arguments that day in the House, and in the run-up to the vote, were vague and convoluted. Much of your reasoning had less to do with the mission itself than with how it had been presented by Stephen Harper’s Conservative government.

“The Prime Minister has not justified these air strikes,” you told reporters at the time.

Speaking in the House, you said: “The Prime Minister has not been upfront with Canadians about his plans. The Prime Minister and his government have given us no reason to believe that, once in combat, they will be able to limit our role.”

The Conservative government, without question, tried to use foreign policy as a wedge issue. You were excluded from a Canadian parliamentary delegation to Ukraine following that country’s revolution against a pro-Russian government last year. That was churlish and cynical.

But I don’t believe the Conservatives acted the same way during the early days of the air campaign against Islamic State. It seemed they genuinely wanted broad parliamentary support behind the mission. How else to explain the invitation to accompany Baird to Iraq that was extended to Garneau and Dewar?

Your accusations of a lack of transparency from the government regarding the mission proved better founded. The Conservatives’ definition of a non-combat role for soldiers on the ground was elastic, and they stretched it.

But none of this—the case the Conservatives made for war, and their transparency about it—matters any more. You will soon be prime minister, and can judge the worth of the air campaign against Islamic State on its own merits, rather than on how it has been presented by a government you oppose.

Let us first tackle the question of whether the air strikes are useful in the campaign against Islamic State. The evidence suggests they are.

Since Islamic State began its lightning advance through northern Iraq in June 2014, air strikes have likely saved Iraqi Kurdistan from being overrun by Islamic State, an outcome that would have resulted in mass slaughter. They helped lift the siege of Kobani in northern Syria, preserving countless civilian lives. And they saved thousands of Yezidis trapped on Mount Sinjar from death and slavery. (Thousands more were murdered and enslaved anyway.)

I would be the first to acknowledge air strikes alone are not enough. But to say they accomplish little good is simply not true.

This leaves us with a second line of argument, one encapsulated by Garneau’s “overkill” line, but also by a quip you made questioning the value of deploying Canada’s “handful of aging warplanes” to the mission. This argument essentially suggests that what Canada can contribute is so small, and what America is already doing is so big, that we shouldn’t bother.

I don’t want to be too presumptuous, but you and I are roughly the same age, so I’m going to guess you’ve watched The Simpsons. You may be familiar with the “Trash of the Titans” episode, in which Homer decides to run for the office of sanitation commissioner under the slogan “Can’t someone else do it?” Your approach to fighting Islamic State isn’t much different.

It’s a shame, because reasons for confronting Islamic State with force are decidedly Liberal. Your party pioneered the notion of “responsibility to protect.” The many, many victims of Islamic State deserve protection—from sexual slavery, homophobic slaughter, sectarian mass murder, and genocide. The Yezidis, a tiny and ancient religious minority, face genocide if they fall under Islamic State’s control. Too many have already perished.

This is why stalwarts of your own Liberal party—men with far more experience than you, such as Bob Rae, Lloyd Axworthy and Irwin Cotler—have spoken out in favour of a combat mission as part of Canada’s response to Islamic State’s barbarism.

This is why the coalition of countries involved in the combat mission includes almost all our closest friends: America, Britain, Australia, France. The United States has already publicly expressed its wish that Canada not abandon the mission, and that hope is not unique among our allies.

You’re going to break a lot of promises over the next four years. That’s not meant as a slur. All politicians promise more than they genuinely think they can deliver, and think they can deliver more than they do. You can deliver on this promise. But it would be the wrong thing to do. Break it. Principled Canadians, to say nothing of Iraqis and Syrians, will thank you for it.

David Cameron (right) looked poised for defeat in his last election; instead, he won a majority. (Leon Neal, Pool, AP Photo)

Is Stephen Harper taking notes from conservative politicians in other counties who have pulled off improbable victories when defeat seemed certain?

Harper seems to be running a multi-leveled campaign. Still present is the calm, rational and reassuring persona the Prime Minister has perfected over his time in office. You get the feeling he wouldn’t lose his temper if someone spit water in his face.
But he’s also running on fear—fear of what a victory by one of his opponents might mean, and the fears of some Canadians about the supposed encroachment of radical Islam.

Harper says his opponents are the ones who have made an issue of his government’s belief that during citizenship ceremonies a woman should not be permitted to wear a niqab—a face veil worn by a tiny minority of Muslim women in Canada. But the Conservatives have run at least one attack ad pillorying Liberal leader Justin Trudeau’s stance opposing that. Harper has also publicly mused about forbidding public servants from wearing the niqab. (If there’s a single civil servant who wears one now, journalists have been unable to find her.) And the Conservatives have pledged to establish a “barbaric cultural practices” tip line, which would admittedly be a handy initiative for those who find 9-1-1 too hard to remember.

As for a Liberal victory, according to recent Conservative ads in Punjabi and Chinese, Liberals want to open brothels “in your neighbourhoods.” The ads also say the Liberals want to legalize marijuana, which the ads claim would allow children easier access to the drug.

The Liberals do want to legalize marijuana for people over the age of 18 and regulate it, which they say would restrict access for children. The Tories’ claim that Liberals want to open neighbourhood brothels is tenuously based on Liberal leader Justin Trudeau voting against anti-prostitution bill C-36.

The Conservative strategy is divisive and populist. But comparable ones elsewhere have had some success.

British Prime Minister David Cameron looked headed for defeat in a general election this spring. Like Harper, Cameron preached economic stability. The country’s financial recovery is fragile, he said, and only by staying the course could Britons ensure it continues. But Cameron also stoked fears among voters, warning of an outcome in which the Labour party formed a minority government with support from the separatist Scottish Nationalist Party. A referendum on Scottish independence had been defeated the previous year.

The SNP did indeed all but sweep Scotland and would have been a powerful voice in a Parliament led by a minority Labour government. But it didn’t matter—Cameron shocked pollsters and analysts by winning his first majority.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took things much, much further during his campaign for re-election earlier this year. He labeled his main opposition, a joint list of candidates from the Labour and Hatunah parties that called itself the Zionist Camp, the “anti-Zionist camp.”

Zionism, broadly speaking, refers to the belief that Jews should have a national homeland in Israel. Netanyahu was coming close to accusing his centre-left opponents of treason.

Then, on election day, Netanyahu warned that “Arab voters are going to the polls in droves,” as if Israeli Arab citizens exercising their democratic rights was a calamitous event to be feared and confronted. Israel’s right rallied to Netanyahu, and he, too, won an election many predicted he would lose.

Will Harper’s wedge-driving politics allow him to reverse a slide in the polls and hold on to power? Counterintuitively, perhaps, Liberal polling gains may not be all bad news for the Tories. Faced with a similar situation only days before the Israeli election, top Netanyahu strategist Aron Shaviv decided to capitalize on Netanyahu’s precarious position, according to reporting by the Wall Street Journal. Instead of projecting public confidence, Netanyahu’s camp emphasized how vulnerable his right-wing Likud party was. The tactic became known as the oy gevalt gambit, referring to the Yiddish expression for “woe is me.”

The idea was to clarify in the minds of voters the very real dangers of a Likud defeat. For Israel, according to the spin, this would mean a leftist takeover.

For Canada, the risks are niqabs, stoned children and prostitutes everywhere. Or maybe stoned prostitutes wearing niqabs. In your neighbourhoods. Woe is us.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/dont-count-stephen-harper-out/feed/18Official says Ottawa intervened for Fahmy hundreds of timeshttp://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/official-says-ottawa-intervened-for-fahmy-hundreds-of-times/
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/official-says-ottawa-intervened-for-fahmy-hundreds-of-times/#commentsThu, 15 Oct 2015 21:43:52 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=770107Mohamed Fahmy, now released from Egyptian prison, has said Canadian government did not do enough to free him

A Canadian government official says Ottawa intervened “hundreds” of times on behalf of Mohamed Fahmy, a Canadian journalist who was working for the Al Jazeera news network in Egypt when he was arrested in December 2013 and spent more than a year in jail before he was pardoned last month.

Fahmy, upon his return to Canada, has said the Canadian government did not do enough to free him.

“Sitting in that prison cell, it was difficult not to feel betrayed and abandoned by Prime Minister [Stephen] Harper,” he said at a news conference this week.

Fahmy, who was ultimately convicted of terror-related charges and sentenced to three years in prison, said Harper delegated responsibility for his case to lower-level officials who lacked the clout to influence the Egyptian government.

But the Canadian government official, who did not want to be named, says government ministers intervened 20 times, and senior government officials intervened hundreds of times. Harper has also said he personally intervened.

The Globe and Mail in February reported Harper sent a letter to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, calling for Fahmy’s release, and that Harper had requested a phone call with Sisi on the matter. Earlier this week the Toronto Star reported that Harper did speak with Sisi, citing an unnamed senior official.

Reached by email, Fahmy said he has always expressed his gratitude to Canada’s embassy staff in Cairo, and to the Canadian government for its support, but maintained that stronger intervention from the Prime Minister was necessary.

“I pointed out from prison to our ambassador in Egypt that the many interventions, through diplomatic notes and letters to the foreign ministry in Egypt, were not as effective in grasping the attention of the president, due to the complicated grapevine of the Egyptian system and the bureaucracy,” Fahmy wrote.

“A direct approach from Prime Minister Harper to the Egyptian president would have been hard to resist, considering the excellent bilateral relations they had, and the $60 million of taxpayers’ money Canada pledged to Egypt, in addition to training their police, my captors.

“Only now, days before the election, we are hearing that the Prime Minister called. If true, then my mother and family would have appreciated the confirmation, knowing that every day in prison was a nightmare for us, as we looked for any light of hope.”

A Syrian man carries his two girls as he walks across the rubble following a barrel-bomb attack on the rebel-held neighbourhood of al-Kalasa in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo on Sept. 17, 2015. Once Syria’s economic powerhouse, Aleppo has been ravaged by fighting since the rebels seized the east of the city in 2012, confining government forces to the west. (Karam Al-Masri/AFP/Getty Images)

“Some may think that a military component has no place in an ethical response to Syria. We completely disagree. It is not ethical to wish away the barrel bombs from the Syrian government when you have the capacity to stop them . . . Nor is it ethical to watch when villages are overrun by ISIS fighters who make sex slaves of children and slaughter their fellow Muslims, when we have the capability to hold them back.”

These words were jointly written and published over the weekend by Jo Cox, a British Labour Party MP, and Andrew Mitchell, a Conservative one.

The barrel bombs to which they refer are one of the main weapons used by Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in his quest to hold onto power. They are mostly dropped on civilians. ISIS is an acronym for the so-called Islamic State, a jihadist group that has taken over large chunks of northeastern Syria and western Iraq and has installed a reign of terror in land it controls.

The two MPs are proposing a new strategy for Syria aimed primarily at protecting Syrian civilians. They argue humanitarian and diplomatic efforts should be accelerated, but that Britain’s military can also play a role—including in helping to establish safe havens inside Syria in which civilians will be protected from both Assad’s forces and Islamic State.

According to the Observer newspaper, at least 50 Labour MPs are prepared to back a military mission to protect Syrian civilians. They are willing to co-operate with their political opponents in the Conservative party to further the initiative—and, by doing so, are defying Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn, who opposes any British military mission in Syria.

The British proposal echoes one put forth by New Brunswick NDP Leader Dominic Cardy, who has called on Canada to lead a campaign to create safe zones and humanitarian corridors in Syria, even if doing so requires the establishment of no-fly zones.

Canada is currently part of a U.S.-led coalition that is bombing Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. It is also training Kurdish fighters to fight Islamic State in northern Iraq. But it has no troops on the ground in Syria and, like its allies, is not directly involved in any military action against Assad’s regime.

There is, so far, no support from Canada’s main national political parties to expand Canada’s military mission to include the creation of safe zones.

The NDP says it would completely end Canada’s military mission in Syria and Iraq if it forms Canada’s next government. The Liberal party opposes Canada’s participation in the air campaign against Islamic State, but says it would continue the training mission. The Conservatives have made no public statements to suggest they would back a military mission to enforce no-fly zones, or to carve out protected enclaves for civilians.

The United States is also opposed. President Barack Obama dismisses arguments in favour of protected safe zones in Syria as “mumbo jumbo.”

“When I hear people offering up half-baked ideas as if they are solutions, or trying to downplay the challenges involved in this situation, what I’d like to see people ask is, specifically, precisely: What exactly would you do, and how would you fund it, and how would you sustain it?” he said at a press conference. “And typically, what you get is a bunch of mumbo-jumbo.”

Obama thinks protecting civilians in Syria is too hard. He thinks doing pretty much anything in Syria is too hard. So, by and large, he doesn’t. But then 250,000 people die, hundreds of thousands of refugees flood into Europe, and Russia starts bombing the few rebels America is supporting.

What Obama has been willing to attempt is limited. In addition to a covert CIA-run program to arm and train a moderate opposition to Assad, the American military ran a separate program to train Syrians willing take on Islamic State. The trainees were told not to attack Assad, whose regime is responsible for the vast majority of civilian deaths in the Syrian civil war. Not surprisingly, few signed up. A program aimed at training more than 5,000 fighters produced about 60, most of whom defected or were captured.

The White House cancelled the whole program last week. Shortly beforehand, Obama’s people tried to wash his hands of it, claiming he never thought it was a good idea in the first place.

“It is true that we have found this to be a difficult challenge,” press secretary Josh Earnest said. “But it is also true that many of our critics had proposed this specific option as essentially the cure-all for all the policy challenges that we are facing in Syria right now. That is not something this administration ever believed, but it is something that our critics will have to answer for.”

Obama is the Toddler President. He has made the crafting of American foreign policy something akin to a four-year-old refusing to cut his own meat:

“I can’t do it.”

“Try.”

(Child ostentatiously knocks food to the floor with his cutlery.)

“See? I told you it wouldn’t work.”

But if America wants to absent itself from confronting one of the largest humanitarian disasters in decades, perhaps its allies should stop looking to Washington for leadership.

Louis de Bernières, in his wonderful novel Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, describes Britain’s response to the 1953 Ionian earthquake. Ships from the Royal Navy were among the first to arrive with help:

“In those days, Great Britain was less wealthy than it is now, but it was also less complacent, and considerably less useless. It had a sense of humanitarian responsibility and a myth of its own importance that was quixotically true and universally accepted, merely because it believed in it, and said so in a voice loud enough for foreigners to understand. It had not yet acquired the schoolboy habit of waiting for months for permission from Washington before it clambered out of its post-imperial bed, put on its boots, made a sugary cup of tea, and ventured through the door.”

It may be too much to hope that those days have returned. But it is heartening to see evidence of moral life in Britain’s body politic. It is especially heartening to see such life in the Labour Party, where some members—if not its leadership—have evidently not forgotten that international solidarity is an ideal that must be acted on, not just sung about.

The leaders of all three major Canadian political parties like to talk about how Canada’s standing in the world has risen under their party’s watch (Conservatives) or has fallen but would be restored should they form government (Liberals, NDP).

This has too often consisted of little more than chest-thumping about Canada’s rhetorical support for Israel and Ukraine, or hair-pulling about the indignity of losing a seat on the United Nations Security Council to Portugal five years ago.

Syrians, meanwhile, are dying by the thousands, and what’s left of the country is emptying into refugee camps or into overloaded rubber dinghies crossing the Aegean Sea.

Using force to protect those who remain—from Islamic State, but also from Assad—is a more ethical course of action than is crying over their deaths, sending survivors food aid, or letting a handful come here as refugees. Canada’s political leaders have staked out positions that are insufficient. MPs who believe Canada really should be a force for good in the world might consider voicing their dissent.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/overcoming-americas-failure/feed/1Which refugees are better than others?http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/which-refugees-are-better-than-others/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/which-refugees-are-better-than-others/#commentsFri, 09 Oct 2015 19:28:41 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=768059Why the Conservative government's policy on whom it would prefer to admit as a refugee is so problematic

Syrians carry the wounded to hospital after Assad regime forces staged an air strike on the opposition-controlled Muvasalat district of Aleppo, Syria, on Sept. 20, 2015 (Mamun Ebu Omer/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

In the charnel house that is Syria, it can seem churlish to weigh the suffering of one group against another. What is worse, to die thrown from a building because you are gay, or to be shot dead fleeing your home because you are Christian? Sexual slavery or starvation? Ethnic cleansing or barrel bombs? The country is devouring all its children in almost equal measure.

That includes Syria’s confessional majority: Sunni Muslims. If the wrath of the so-called Islamic State has come down disproportionately on non-Sunni Muslims—Yazidis, Shias, Alawites and Christians—then that of dictator Bashar al-Assad’s mostly Alawite regime has focused on the Sunni Muslim majority.

This is what makes Canada’s policy on whom it would prefer to admit as a refugee problematic. “We will prioritize persecuted ethnic and religious minorities, those at demonstrated risk, and we make no apologies for that,” Costas Menegakis, parliamentary secretary to Immigration Minister Chris Alexander, said in December.

A policy that favours religious minorities in Syria would, by definition, discriminate against Sunni Muslims, because of their majority status in the country.

A Globe and Mail story today seems to confirm that the government has acted on its long-stated policy. The newspaper reports that “areas of focus” have been made part of a refugee triage system that favours some United Nations-referred refugees over others. The criteria, the Globe reports, include specific groups, such as “religious minorities, and people such as gays and lesbians who face discrimination because of their sexuality.”

The criteria also reportedly favour those the government believes are more likely to successfully integrate in Canada, such as people who speak French or English, have run a business or have family in Canada.

If these areas of focus do exist, they don’t appear to have had much of an impact on the sectarian makeup of refugees admitted so far. An Ottawa Citizen story last month reported that only about five per cent of Syrian refugees Canada took in this year as part of its government-assisted program were vulnerable ethnic or religious minorities. Some 90 per cent of privately sponsored refugees, by contrast, were so defined.

It’s possible the government wants to shift these percentages in future to bring in more religious minorities through its government-assisted refugee program. Some have accused Prime Minister Stephen Harper of an anti-Muslim bias toward refugees. And it is difficult to justify a policy that favours religious minorities from a country in which the suffering of the Sunni Muslim majority equals or surpasses that of other groups.

The alleged bias toward businesspeople, the young and those with language skills raises further questions about the larger goal of Canada’s refugee policy. Is it to provide refuge to those most in need? In other words, should Canada’s approach to refugees be guided solely by humanitarian motives? Or should it incorporate elements of our approach to immigration, and try to select people who are more likely to be a benefit to Canada over the long run?

One answer does not necessarily preclude the other. Who today wishes Canada had fewer Vietnamese, Hungarians, Jews or Ismaili Muslims? All came in large waves to escape persecution at a time when Canada’s refugee admission process was less cumbersome than it is now, and all, by and large, have done well.

There is little reason to believe that Sunni Muslim Syrians who make it through Canada’s security screening process, as all refugees must, would not similarly thrive. And if our goal is to offer sanctuary to the most vulnerable, they should also be admitted on equal footing as their Christian countrymen. Syria’s inferno hasn’t spared them, either.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/which-refugees-are-better-than-others/feed/18Russia’s other war in Eastern Europehttp://www.macleans.ca/news/world/russias-other-war-in-eastern-europe/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/russias-other-war-in-eastern-europe/#commentsThu, 08 Oct 2015 17:37:26 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=767249Western governments are struggling with how to counter a sophisticated, entertaining and popular Kremlin-backed media

In the early stages of Russia’s initially covert invasion of Crimea last year, a woman outside the parliament in Simferopol told a Maclean’s reporter why she thought so little of the protesters in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, who had forced the departure of Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, days earlier.

They had been drugged, she explained of the demonstrators. Some sort of hallucinogenic had been slipped into their tea. A local man had gone to Kyiv, taken part in the protests and returned, whereupon doctors in a hospital discovered traces of the drugs in his blood, she said. Another woman in Kyiv who also opposed the street demonstrations told an almost identical story.

Both women said they learned about the drugged protesters from watching Russian-language television. They didn’t say which stations, but they were almost certainly ones controlled by or beholden to the Kremlin.

This disinformation campaign was part of what Jerzy Pomianowski, a former Polish diplomat who now heads the European Endowment for Democracy (EED), describes as Russia’s “hybrid war.” In addition to sending troops to Crimea, and later into eastern Ukraine, Russia used media propaganda to convince people in those areas that “fascists” in Kyiv threatened them and that Russia would protect them.

“In a moment of war, when a people really don’t know what to think and how to understand a situation, that makes them naturally not able to properly react when a group of 1,000 or 2,000 separatists suddenly seize control of a city. Having no alternative information, the people living there tend to agree: maybe yes, this is the solution for our situation,” he says.

Russia, says, Pomianowski, has invested a lot of time and resources into developing Russian-language media that will convey the narrative it wishes to project. Alternative voices are sometimes targeted and suppressed, but they are not always eliminated the way they might be in an outright dictatorship.

“In fact, the media that pursued editorial independence could even be useful for the Kremlin as a safety valve for the critically minded to let off steam,” writes Russia analyst Maria Lipman in an essay included in a recent report by the EED: “Bringing plurality and balance to the Russian-language media space.”

Russian speakers in Russia, Eastern Europe and the Baltic states are not forced to consume pro-Kremlin media; they choose to do so. And in many cases they make that choice because pro-Russian media content is better—more entertaining and more sophisticatedly produced—than the alternatives.

Instead of a constant barrage of hackneyed political propaganda, Kremlin-backed media offer pure entertainment, and also more subtle messaging—documentaries, for example, that portray the Soviet Union’s non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany in a positive light, that revisit historic abuses against Russians, or that obsess over the rights enjoyed by homosexuals in Western Europe.

Pro-Kremlin media have built up loyalty and credibility among their viewers. This makes it difficult for media that don’t toe the Kremlin line to make inroads. “You have no access to those audiences with just the right information instead of wrong,” says Pomianowski. “You need to take action that will recapture their trust and also provide enough attractive non-news content so they will be happy to change their choice.”

It’s a task, Pomianowski says, that Western governments are beginning to accept they should shoulder. In September, some 35 European countries, along with like-minded nations such as Korea, Japan and the United States, gathered in Warsaw to discuss options and funding for them. Canada was there but its participation was limited because of the ongoing election campaign, says Pomianowski. The EED took part in an advisory capacity.

The meeting ended with the Netherlands pledging $2.2 million and Poland $1.5 million toward new Russian-language media initiatives. Pomianowski says he expects more money will be forthcoming. The funds won’t be used to start a new television station from scratch. Rather, options include what Pomianowski describes as a “media excellence centre,” a “content factory,” that will generate content for existing outlets, and a news agency.

“We are not just creating new institutions. We are creating new forms of co-operation, and we are integrating existing partnerships. But at the same time those existing parties need to be strengthened,” he says.

Pomianowski says there are weaknesses in the content Kremlin-backed media offer. They don’t do local news well, he says, and this is an opening new Russian-language media might exploit. But winning viewers will not be easy, and Pomianowski admits: “We already realized it’s too little, too late.”

During the Cold War, citizens of the Soviet bloc distrusted their official media and took risks to access Western outlets. “Now the West’s credibility in Russia has shrivelled and, along with it, the ability of Western media to make an impact,” writes author and journalist Edward Lucas in an essay included in the EED report.

“Many Western policy-makers still seem to believe that all they need to do is crank up the old machines from the 1970s and 1980s and Russians will gratefully drink from the Western wellspring.”

The West still can sway hearts and minds in the Russian-speaking world, says Lucas. Some self-confidence would help. The European Union and NATO are both far richer and more powerful than Russia. Hardly anyone wants to move to Russia, but millions of Russians are emigrating.

“What is really lacking in Europe and North America is clarity of thought and willpower,” he writes. “We have to realize that we are again in a sharp strategic contest with the Kremlin and that we are losing.”

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/russias-other-war-in-eastern-europe/feed/1Vladimir Putin’s new world order in the Middle Easthttp://www.macleans.ca/politics/worldpolitics/vladimir-putins-new-world-order-in-the-middle-east/
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/worldpolitics/vladimir-putins-new-world-order-in-the-middle-east/#commentsThu, 08 Oct 2015 10:22:11 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=766623By entering the Syrian civil war, Russia is asserting itself as a new power in the Middle East—at America’s expense. And everything will be worse for it.

The civil war in Syria raged for more than four years and killed more than 250,000 people without an outside power dropping a bomb anywhere near soldiers loyal to dictator Bashar al-Assad, whose forces are responsible for the vast majority of civilian deaths in the conflict.

Then Russia joined the war. Its air strikes, which began last Wednesday, did not hit Assad’s forces, of course. The Russians, with their fighter jets and attack helicopters, are in Syria at Assad’s invitation, operating out of an air base in territory he controls. But they did target positions close to the front line between regime- and rebel-controlled areas.

The intended target, according to Russia, was the so-called Islamic State, a jihadist group also known as ISIS, which a U.S.-led coalition that includes Canada is also bombing—as well as “other terrorist groups.” In fact, most of Russia’s bombs have hit areas with little or no Islamic State presence. The victims include a variety of opposition groups, including, according to U.S. Sen. John McCain and others, American-backed groups that have been armed and trained by the CIA.

“Even though the Russians are framing it as a fight against ISIS, if you look at their targeting, it’s really a fight against rebels that directly threaten Assad and his coastal stronghold,” says William McCants, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of The ISIS Apocalypse: The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State. “[Russian President Vladimir Putin] has adopted the Assad regime’s framework of terrorism, which is anyone who is attempting to overthrow the regime.”

The Russians, in other words, are not in Syria to fight terrorism—at least, not primarily—but to fight for Assad.

Moscow has put its military might behind a dictator that U.S. President Barack Obama said four years ago must step down, whose opponents America arms and funds, and whom thousands of Syrians have died trying to overthrow. By so doing, Putin has taken advantage of years of relative American inaction in Syria. He has moved to protect Russian assets in Syria, including a naval base he would likely lose if Assad were to fall. And he’s shown Russia to be a reliable ally where America is not, thereby spreading and deepening Russia’s influence in the region at Washington’s expense.

It is—at least at first blush—something of a coup for Moscow. Fresh on the heels of Russia’s successful invasion, then annexation, of the Ukrainian region of Crimea, which was accomplished in the face of Western protest and sanctions, Russia has now undercut Western power and relevance in the Middle East.

What Russia has not done, despite its professed desire for peace in Syria, is improve the chances of a settlement to end the war that most Syrians will accept. Nor is Russia helping the cause that has ostensibly brought it to Syria in the first place: the fight against terrorism. Few Syrians other than those loyal to Assad will benefit from Russia’s military intervention. The jihadists of Islamic State just might.

Whatever faults he may have, Bashar al-Assad is not stupid. He is, in fact, a supremely crafty survivor. The Arab Spring revolutions of 2010 and 2011 swept from office his fellow strongmen in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. Assad’s chances of survival then, as the uprising against him morphed into civil war, did not look good—which is probably why Obama said the time had come for him to step aside, without having a strategy to make that happen.

So Assad gambled on portraying his regime as the lesser evil among the warring parties in Syria. “Assad and his intelligence apparatus have consistently facilitated the rise of jihadists,” writes Charles Lister, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Doha Center, in a recent essay. “By releasing dozens of al-Qaeda prisoners in mid-2011, Assad helped give birth to a thriving Islamist insurgency . . . By then adopting a deliberate policy of not targeting [Islamic State], Assad directly facilitated that group’s recovery and explosion into the transnational ‘caliphate’ movement it claims to be today.”

This manipulation of jihadism by Assad’s regime has been well-documented—including by authors Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan in their recent biography of Islamic State, ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror. McCants calls Assad “both arsonist and fireman” in the Syrian conflict. He fuelled the rise of Islamic State and presents himself as the only force that can stop it.

Four years later, it appears Assad’s bald cynicism has worked. Washington still says Assad has to go, but it isn’t that fussy about when. Assad’s removal “doesn’t have to be on Day 1 or Month 1 or whatever,” Secretary of State John Kerry said last month. He might as well have sent the Russian air force an invitation.

A Syrian man carries his two girls as he walks across the rubble following a barrel bomb attack on the rebel-held neighbourhood of al-Kalasa in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo on September 17, 2015. Once Syria’s economic powerhouse, Aleppo has been ravaged by fighting since the rebels seized the east of the city in 2012, confining government forces to the west. (Karam Al-Masri/AFP/Getty Images)

Russia’s primary and immediate goal is the survival of the Assad regime. Assad’s forces have recently been losing ground to various rebel groups in northern and western Syria, far from Islamic State’s stronghold in the northeast. Reuters last week reported that Iran, a longtime Syrian ally, was sending hundreds of additional troops to Syria to aid fighters from the Lebanese Shia militia Hezbollah and Syrian government forces in a planned offensive, backed by Russia.

Inserting Russian planes into Syrian air space also limits some of the military options that outside opponents of Assad might have considered. Turkey, for example, has long called for no-fly zones and protected safe havens in Syria. “Russian presence on the ground is an immediate deterrent to that, which stiffens morale on the regime side, saying, ‘We’re not going to let these external powers escalate their intervention,’ ” says Yezid Sayigh, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Middle East Center.

A second Russian goal is to assert Russia’s status as a force that must be reckoned with in the Middle East. Russia has made much of its recent intelligence-sharing deal with Syria, Iran and Iraq in the fight against Islamic State. In practice, because of its shortage of assets in the region, Russia doesn’t have that much intelligence on the group to share, but the symbolism—especially Russia’s partnership with Iraq, where America invested so much blood and treasure—is striking.

In Syria, Russia is working to ensure it will have a say in the country’s future. “They are signalling to the international community that nothing could be handled in Syria without them right now,” says Nikolay Kozhanov, a fellow in the Russia and Eurasia Program at Chatham House.

There may also be domestic political factors at play. Putin regularly appeals to Russians’ nationalism, which can be heightened when the country is at war. But the tactic involves risks.This is Russia’s first combat mission outside the former Soviet Union since the end of the Cold War. “The Russian people remember Afghanistan,” says Paul Stronski, a senior associate in the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “They remember Chechnya. They remember previous forays into the Muslim world, and how deadly they were for Russian soldiers. So I don’t think there’s a whole lot of appetite inside Russia to get involved in another war in the Muslim world right now.”

Official Russian combat in Syria is limited to air strikes. But on Monday, a Kremlin official reportedly predicted that Russian military veterans may soon volunteer to fight in Syria—raising the possibility that Moscow may be considering waging a covert ground war in Syria similar to the one it conducted in Ukraine.

Syrians hold posters of Syrian President Bashar Assad, far left, and Russian President Vladimir Putin, second left, during a pro-Syrian goverment protest in front of the Russian Embassy in Damascus, Syria, in 2012. (AP Photo/Muzaffar Salman, File)

Finally, and perhaps most important, from Moscow’s perspective, Putin believes Russia is engaged in a larger geostrategic struggle against the United States and its allies. America has called for Assad’s departure. Its desultory attempts to make that happen haven’t worked. By going to war for Assad, and by calling for a new international coalition against Islamic State that includes the Syrian dictator, Putin is publicly rubbing Obama’s nose in his own failures, and is presenting Russia as an alternative guarantor of world order.

“What Putin is doing in Syria is he’s testing the West,” says Anna Borshchevskaya, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “It’s a classic Kremlin approach. He did the same thing in Ukraine. He takes steps and he wants to see what’s the response.”

That response so far has been mild. Last Friday, after it became clear Russia was hitting rebel groups other than Islamic State, America, along with France, Britain, Germany, Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, issued a statement expressing “deep concern” and calling on Russia to bomb the jihadist group instead. Russian violation of Turkish air space last weekend also drew an official protest from NATO, of which Turkey is a member.

Friday’s statement from the U.S. and some of its allies predicted Russia’s intervention will fuel more radicalism and extremism. This is undoubtedly correct. “One of the major recruitment tools in that part of the world for Islamic State is the brutal way in which the Syrian government, the Assad regime, has treated its citizens,” says Angela Stent, director of the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies at Georgetown University. “Shoring Assad up, it’s very hard to see how that contributes toward stability in the Middle East.”

Any effort to confront Islamic State that includes Assad is similarly likely to be rejected by most Syrians. This is why Russia’s declared goal of working toward a political settlement that involves Syria’s “healthy opposition” is disingenuous. Even if Russia were able to construct an agreement on paper that leaves Assad in power for a “transition period,” many rebels groups will continue to fight.

A more robust response from the West to Russia’s air strikes might include more substantial military assistance to rebels opposing Assad. Even aid on a scale too modest to affect the overall course of the war could at least protect Syrians from some of Assad’s more egregious rampages, such as his air force’s habit of dropping crude “barrel bombs” on civilian neighbourhoods. “It’s pretty shameful that there have not been more active efforts to stop indiscriminate bombing of civilians,” says Sayigh.

He says training just two squads of rebels, and arming them with a limited number of anti-aircraft missiles would have had a sizable deterrent effect. “Shooting down a few aircraft conducting highly illegitimate bombing runs on civilian populations would have been a very legitimate thing to do,” he says. “There’s always the potential for escalation. But by withholding from any form of escalation for the last three years, all that’s happened is we end up now with Russian troops on the ground, because they’re correctly reading this reluctance as giving them an open field.”

More substantial actions are probably off the table. Marc Pierini, a former European Union ambassador to Syria and now a visiting scholar at Carnegie Europe, describes the establishment of protected safe zones as “a good idea of yesterday.” It would always have been difficult. Now, “the idea is dead.”

America, to some extent, tied its own hands when it failed to enforce its own “red line” and didn’t respond with force to a Syrian-government chemical-weapons attack that killed hundreds of civilians in 2013. If gassing children to death isn’t enough to trigger American military action against Assad, what would?

The U.S. and its allies will likely instead continue to focus military efforts against Islamic State, while Assad batters much of the rest of Syria, now with Moscow’s assistance. “I think all of the options that were viable have disappeared,” says McCants, speaking of what Assad’s opponents outside Syria might have done to force his departure.

Assad’s exit now seems as far away as it has at any point since the uprising against him began. But those committed to his defeat inside Syria remain numerous; Assad is not on the cusp of victory, either.

One possible outcome, says McCants, is military stalemate, followed, eventually, by negotiations that lead to the federation of Syria or perhaps its breakup. The chances of Syria emerging from this war unified, at peace, and led by a more decent government than Assad’s, are slipping away.

“I see this as the final endgame in Syria,” says McCants. “It seems to me that we are seeing the final consequences of American inaction over the last few years.”

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/worldpolitics/vladimir-putins-new-world-order-in-the-middle-east/feed/9New Brunswick NDP leader argues for intervention in Syriahttp://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/new-brunswick-ndp-leader-argues-for-intervention-in-syria/
Fri, 02 Oct 2015 11:41:17 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=763637New Brunswick NDP leader's proposal for a bigger Canadian role in Syria reflects a division running through the party over how to achieve peace

The work of Bashar al-Assad: Men carry an injured civilian after a bombing in Maaret al-Naaman, Syria. (Khalil Ashawi/Reuters)

The leader of the New Brunswick New Democratic Party has founded an organization that is urging Canada to lead a campaign to halt the bombardment of civilian areas in Syria and create safe zones and humanitarian corridors there—by imposing no-fly zones, if necessary.

Such a measure would result in Canada expanding its military campaign in Syria and Iraq—which now targets the so-called Islamic State jihadist group—to the planes, helicopters and air defences of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.

Dominic Cardy this week launched “Canadians for Peace in Syria” and a petition calling for the full implementation of United Nations Security Resolution 2139, which demands that all parties in the war cease attacks against civilians, as well as the indiscriminate use in populated areas of weapons such as barrel bombs. The resolution also demands, among other things, the unimpeded delivery of medical and humanitarian assistance to those in need.

Cardy supports Canada’s participation in the bombing campaign against Islamic State—a position that puts him squarely in opposition to the federal NDP led by Tom Mulcair, which is campaigning on a pledge to end Canada’s involvement in the war. But Cardy believes the mission is too narrow and ignores the biggest source of misery in Syria.

“We’ve got to look at why those refugees are leaving their country. It’s because they’re being bombed incessantly by a regime that’s responsible for well over 90 per cent of the deaths in this conflict, far more than ISIS, or any of the other groups,” he says, referring to Islamic State by an acronym.

“Absolutely, ISIS is a problem, but ISIS is a creature of the collapse of the Syrian government and its legitimacy. So we should be going after the real problem, which is the government of Bashar al-Assad bombing its civilians on a constant basis for four years.”

Cardy says he hasn’t spoken recently with Mulcair about this. Maclean’s sent a message to Mulcair’s press secretary, and to the NDP’s press secretary, but they did not provide a response.

But Cardy says all Canadian political parties have responded inadequately to the war and humanitarian disaster in Syria. He hopes a campaign focused on protecting civilians—using force only if necessary—might unite them.

Cardy says his interventionist stance on Syria, in contrast to Mulcair’s opposition to the use of Canadian military force there, reflects a division that runs through the NDP and other centre-left parties around the world.

Some on the left believe foreign policy should be built on pacifism, he says. Others believe ideals of universal solidarity come with obligations to act on them.

“I think the responsibility for a left-wing party is to stand up strongly and firmly and say that, yes, as Canadians, we recognize that we are all members of the human race, and we all have responsibilities toward each other—which isn’t just trying to pick up the pieces after people have been displaced in the millions from a civil war that we could have stopped from becoming much worse a long time ago,” he says.

“Of course, you can’t go and fix every single problem in the world. But here is a case where we have millions and millions of people who are being displaced. And this is causing problems across a wide range of countries. So if there was ever a time that we should be looking at intervening in a positive way, it would seem to be this one.”

]]>The foreign policy issue everyone ignoredhttp://www.macleans.ca/news/world/the-foreign-policy-issue-everyone-ignored/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/the-foreign-policy-issue-everyone-ignored/#commentsTue, 29 Sep 2015 13:58:01 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=762277None of the leaders really pressed each other on the Syrian war. Doing so might have exposed difficult questions for all of them.

All three party leaders entered Monday night’s Munk Debate on foreign policy with significant vulnerabilities and all three emerged from the fracas if not unscathed, at least undamaged.

Syria should be considered a blight on the world and on the credibility of any political leader of note who’s been in power since the war there began some 4½ years ago. More than 250,000 have died. Almost 12 million are displaced. There is no light on the horizon in that country. And for all the tears and outrage this summer, it must be said that few in the West really cared until those fleeing Syria started washing up, dead and alive, on European shores.

But now we are paying attention, and the foreign policy debate was an ideal opportunity to probe, scrutinize and challenge the positions of the three main parties regarding that war.

Prime Minister and Conservative Leader Stephen Harper is campaigning on the fact that only the Conservatives support a combat role for Canada in the coalition that is fighting the so-called Islamic State, a jihadist group that has carved out significant territory in northwestern Syria, where it murders Western hostages, enslaves women and massacres religious minorities. Harper’s position is that no matter how many refugees Canada and other Western nations accept, it will never be enough, because Islamic State will create more. The source of despair in Syria, he says, must be dealt with.

That’s valid, to a point. But the vast majority of refugees fleeing Syria are running not from Islamic State, but from Syria’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad. And even if we accept the necessity of combating Islamic State, the fact remains that the U.S.-led campaign against the group has been going on for a year now, with middling results.

Justin Trudeau and Tom Mulcair might have argued that Canada is losing a war under Harper’s leadership. They didn’t press this point, though perhaps because doing so invites equally difficult questions about their own policies on Syria. And these, too, are a mess.

Let’s start with the Liberals under Trudeau. He supports the military mission against Islamic State, but not Canada’s air war. Instead of dropping bombs, he says Canada should refocus on training local forces on the ground. Presumably he means Iraqi regulars and Iraqi Kurdish soldiers, rather than the anti-Islamic State fighters in Syria.

But that raises an interesting question: Would Trudeau support Canadian troops training, say, the YPG, a mostly Kurdish militia, in northern Syria? Pity nobody asked him.

Trudeau’s aversion to Canadian air strikes may appeal to voters opposed to Canada’s involvement in most any war and it allowed him to differentiate himself from Harper, but it’s a logically flimsy position to take. Kobani, a Syrian city that was besieged for months by Islamic State, is free today because of American air strikes. Islamic State’s advance into northern Iraq was stopped because of air strikes coordinated with Kurdish troops on the ground. Dismissing air strikes as intrinsically ineffective is not a serious position.

Harper could have hammered him on that but didn’t.

As for the NDP, Mulcair would end Canada’s military role in the fight against Islamic State completely. This invites the question moderator Rudyard Griffiths did in fact ask last night: If you won’t fight Islamic State, under what circumstances would an NDP government deploy Canadian troops? Mulcair’s been asked this before and has a practised response designed to demonstrate that the NDP are not a bunch of weedy pacifists.

The party supported the initial NATO intervention in Libya, he said, and it supported military airlift assistance to France in its conflict with Islamists in Mali. But here, too, Mulcair’s logic falls down.

Why did threatened civilians in eastern Libya deserve Canada’s armed protection if civilians in Syria and Iraq do not? If it was acceptable to deploy our air force in Mali, would the NDP approve of a similar role in Iraq and Syria? Mulcair, like Trudeau and Harper, got off easy.

A more fulsome debate would have directly confronted the true source of misery in Syria: Assad. What might a Canadian government do to mitigate his barbarism? Would any of the parties support the creation of a no-fly zone imposed by force, if necessary? What about protected safe zones on the ground? This was a conversation it seems none of the leaders wanted to have.

Instead of debating about Syria’s civil war, the three parties focused on its ramifications—namely the refugee crisis. Harper looked extremely exposed on this a few weeks ago when it emerged that the family of Alan Kurdi, the Syrian toddler who was photographed dead on a Turkish beach, had hoped to come to Canada. Kurdi’s family gave up because of the onerous and likely insurmountable bureaucratic obstacles in their way.

The Conservatives defended themselves somewhat by taking steps to streamline and speed up the process by which refugees might enter Canada. But Trudeau and Mulcair’s attacks on Harper’s record on refugees were still among the more heated of the debate. Both men spoke with what appeared to be genuine emotion about Canada’s values of hospitality toward those in need, and how Harper’s Conservative government has supposedly betrayed them.

Harper responded as he always does: by not rising to the bait, and showing no emotion stronger than mild disdain. He wants to appear in control, a steady hand guiding Canada in a turbulent world. He barely raised his voice.

Mulcair was more aggressive, but he too wants to reassure voters that he can be trusted leading their country on the world stage, and he too was mostly subdued in tone, with the exception of several witty barbs thrown at Trudeau. Asking him how he can be expected to stand up to Russian President Vladimir Putin when he can’t do the same to Harper was perhaps the best.

This left Trudeau to show the most belligerence and energy about everything from his father, whom he praised while simultaneously excoriating his opponents for criticizing, to Canada’s history as a peacekeeping nation.

All three leaders seemed to have executed their pre-debate game plan well. Harper appeared calm, Mulcair reasonable and Trudeau passionate. Their debate coaches and communications strategists are likely pleased. But anyone who was hoping for a deeper examination of how Canada might better tackle the most serious foreign policy challenge in the world today—the Syrian civil war—should not be.